Mass suicide

Mass suicide is a form of suicide, occurring when a group of people simultaneously kill themselves. Mass suicide sometimes occurs in religious settings. In war, defeated groups may resort to mass suicide rather than being captured. Suicide pacts are a form of mass suicide that are sometimes planned or carried out by small groups of depressed or hopeless people. Mass suicides have been used as a form of political protest.^{[citation needed]}

Attitudes towards mass suicide change according to place and circumstance. People who resort to mass suicide rather than submit to what they consider intolerable oppression sometimes become the focus of a heroic myth.^[1] Such mass suicides might also win the grudging respect of the victors. On the other hand, the act of people resorting to mass suicide without being threatened – especially, when driven to this step by a charismatic religious leader, for reasons which often seem obscure – tends to be regarded far more negatively.^{[citation needed]}

• Following the destruction of the Iberian city of Illiturgis by Roman General Publius Cornelius Scipio in 206 BC, people of Astapa – knowing they faced a similar fate – decided to burn the city with all of its treasures and then kill themselves.^[2]
• According to Roman historians, after the
  Teuton women committed mass suicide following their loss.^[3]
• At the end of the fifteen months of the siege of Numantia in summer 133 BC, many of the defeated Numantines preferred to kill themselves instead of surrendering to the Romans and set fire to the city.^[4]
• The 960 members of the
  Jewish community at Masada collectively killed themselves in 73 AD rather than be conquered and enslaved by the Romans. Each man killed his wife and children, then the men drew lots and killed each other until the last man killed himself. Some modern scholars have questioned this account of the events.^[5][6]
• In the 700s, the remnants of the
  Montanists were ordered by Byzantine Emperor Leo III to leave their religion and join orthodox Christianity. They refused, locked themselves in their places of worship, and set them on fire.^[7]
• In
  Chittaur in Rajasthan, in 1303, in 1535, and 1568.^[8]
• In 1336, when the castle of
  Teutonic Knights, the defenders, led by the Duke Margiris, realized that it was impossible to defend themselves any longer and made the decision to kill themselves, as well as to set the castle on fire in order to destroy all of their possessions, and anything of value to the enemy.^{[9][unreliable source?}
  ]
• In 1792,
  Battle of Matouba on 28 May 1802, Delgrès and his followers – 400 men and some women – ignited their gunpowder stores, killing themselves while attempting to kill as many of the French troops as possible.^[10]
• During the
  precipice and then jumped themselves, to avoid capture – an event known as the Dance of Zalongo.^[11]
• During the Battle of Okinawa, many of the island's civilians committed mass suicide using grenades or jumping off cliffs rather than be captured by the invading American forces.^{[citation needed]}
• In the final phase of the
  Miła 18 killed themselves by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.^[12]
• Germany was stricken by a series of unprecedented
  waves of suicides during the final days of the Nazi regime.^[13] On 1 May 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide in the advent of the Red Army's capture of the town.^[14]
• A
  Dutch colonial forces. The root of the Balinese term puputan is puput, meaning 'finishing' or 'ending'. It is an act that is more symbolic than strategic; the Balinese are "a people whose genius for theatre is unsurpassed" and a puputan is viewed as "the last act of a tragic dance-drama".^[15]
• During the final days of the Battle of Saipan, over 1,000 Japanese citizens would die in mass suicides, many throwing themselves off the "Suicide Cliff" and "Banzai Cliff".^[16]
• 90 women committed mass suicide by drowning themselves during the partition of India.^[17]

During the

Yogmaya Neupane and her group of 67 disciples committed the biggest mass suicide (Jal-Samadhi) in Nepali history, by jumping into the Arun River (China–Nepal) in 1941.^[22]

On November 18, 1978, 918 people died in Peoples Temple–related incidents, led by Jim Jones, in Jonestown and Georgetown in Guyana.^[23][24] Using cyanide and tranquilizers, more than 200 children were murdered in the incident, and many of the elderly were forcibly injected with poison.^[24] Many of the adults seem to have died willingly, though this is contested and there was dissent.^[24] Jones declared the act a "revolutionary suicide", which had been used as a term within the group even prior to the massacre.^[25]

From 1994 to 1997, the Order of the Solar Temple's members began a series of mass suicides and murders, which led to roughly 74 deaths. The first occurred in Switzerland in 1994, followed by additional deaths in France in 1995, and finally a mass suicide in Quebec in 1997. The group was led by Joseph Di Mambro, alongside Luc Jouret. Farewell letters were left by members, stating that they believed their deaths would be an escape from the "hypocrisies and oppression of this world".^[26] Members believed that a death was a "transition" to another state of being.^[27]

In March 1997, 39 followers of Heaven's Gate died in a mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The group, led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, believed that through their deaths they were exiting their human "vessels", which would allow them to advance to the "Next Level" via a spaceship they believed to be following comet Hale–Bopp.^[28]

On March 17, 2000, several hundred members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in Uganda.

In August 2004, ten dead bodies were discovered, all in a sleeping position, inside a two-story house located at Béchard Lane in the suburb of Saint Paul, Vacoas-Phoenix on the island of Mauritius. They had been missing for a number of days, and large loans had been contracted by some of the victims a short time before their deaths. Several of them were active members of the Eckankar sect. The main gate and all doors of the house had been locked from the inside, and the interior was in tidy order when police broke into the house.^[33][34][35]

In 2007, in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, a family of nine, all members of a novel "Adam's cult", committed mass suicide by hurling themselves under a train. Diaries recovered from the victims' home, the "Adam House", related they wanted a pure life as lived by Adam and Eve, freeing themselves from bondage to any religion, and refusing contact with any outsiders. After leaving Islam, they fell out of boundaries of any particular religion.^[36][37]

In 2018, eleven family members of the Chundawat family were found dead in their home in

In May 2019, five members of a "medieval sex cult" were found dead in what investigators believe to be a mass suicide or consensual homicide-suicide. Two bodies were discovered in a flat in Wittingen and three more, including the leader, in a hotel near Passau. ^[38]

In April 2023, 110 dead bodies were found in the

• Cult
• Religious fanaticism
• Puputan
• Folie à deux