OBSESSION

An obsessive attachment to a woman can be so strong in some men that if they can't have them, they want to end it all for them both. It's the ultimate in getting the last word.

The intimate couple is usually in their twenties or thirties. The man is abusive, psychologically and/or physically. All of his passion and pain are focused on the woman. Obsessed with her to the extent that he feels he can’t live without her, he is fiercely jealous and determined to isolate her. He decides if they can’t live together, they can die together.

So dependent are these men on their women that they would sooner be dead than to live without them. But suicide is frightening. They resist. They can’t get up the nerve to do it. They find a way to force themselves over the edge. Once they kill the woman, their resistance is gone and they turn the weapon on themselves. After committing a homicide, the reasoning goes, the only way out is suicide.

ALTRUISM

A growing concern today is the inadequacy of care at the end of life. A high suicide rate among elderly men is the results. Suicide-murder among the elderly is increasing, especially in the state of Florida with its high proportion of residents over the age of 65.

The typical case involves an elderly man who is impaired and feeble and does not want to go to a nursing home. So he kills his frail wife and himself.

Researcher Donna Cohen of the University of South Florida has identified factors in the spousal cases of this sort. She has compared twenty cases of homicide/suicides with cases of suicide alone. The suicide cases that included murder were distinct in that either domestic violence was involved or the men were caregivers to their wives.

Men in both categories suffered from depression. All of the homicide-plus-suicide cases involved use of a firearm. Often here, the marriage had been a long and happy one, but serious medical conditions and lack of family support gave the husband a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

Of all the situations involving domestic murder-suicide, this type is probably the most preventable because its occurrence is related not to politics or to individual psychopathology but rather to the deficiencies in long-term health care provisions.

RESEARCH

Because the government does not collect statistics on suicides that follow murder, one has to go to multiple sources to discern the patterns.

To get a quick idea of the current status of murder-suicide, just Google the news; in June of 2006, there were over four thousand hits. Even though at least two reports of double or triple murders appear in the national news every day, we must bear in mind that not all murders are reported in the news, and not all new stories are compiled by Google.

The Violence Policy Center did a study in 2002, during a six-month period in which 662 people died in murder-suicides in the United States. That averages out to about two such killings per day. More died from murder associated with suicide (369) than from suicide itself (293). Three-fourths of the murder-suicides involved “intimate partner” situations, and of these, 94 percent involved male attacks on women.

Milton Rosenbaum of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico compared twelve cases of murder-suicide to twenty-four couple-homicide cases, through interviews with family members and friends. The perpetrators of murder-suicide were often found to be depressed. Almost all of these killers were men, while the perpetrators of homicide alone were not depressed, and fully one-half were women.

Other studies by psychiatrists describe the typical young male perpetrator with a history of suicide attempts and stalking as intensely jealous, and full of rage at those they see as their victimizers.

In mental health jargon, suicidal murderers would be called antisocial, at the very least. They are driven to kill, as well as be killed. Hurt and anger have given them complete disregard for the lives of others.

A medical-risk report from Yale University School of Medicine states that homicide-suicides are more similar to suicides than they are to homicides, in that suicidal thoughts and hopelessness are predominant.

The higher the homicide rate in a given location, the lower the rate of suicide-murder. The United States has a very low rate of four to five percent, for example, while Denmark’s rate runs closer to forty-two percent.

In my own state of Iowa, with a low crime rate, between 1995 and 2005, 106 Iowans killed a domestic partner or spouse. The most commonly reported factor in Iowa was an impending breakup. Ninety-six of the killers were men; and about half of them committed suicide shortly after the murder.

The state with the largest number of cases in 2002 was Florida, with thirty-five. A typical sunbelt murder-suicide involves the most pathetic kind of breakup: an elderly man, overwhelmed by his inability to care for his beloved wife, takes her with him when he makes his final exit.

Contact Dr. Katherine van Wormer
Department of Social Work
University of Northern Iowa

Props to Sinead O'Connor
For her version of Gloomy Sunday