BMJ  2004;329:1298-1299 (4 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7478.1298

Editorial

Suicide pacts and the internet

Complete strangers may make cyberspace pacts

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The recent deaths of nine people in Japan, in October 2004, apparently in two suicide pacts¹—seven suicides in one pact and two in the other—have brought the relatively rare phenomenon of suicide pacts into the limelight. What is unusual is that these pacts seem to have been arranged between strangers who met over the internet and planned the tragedy via special suicide websites. This is in contrast to traditional suicide pacts, in which the victims are people with close relationships.

A suicide pact is an agreement between two or more people to commit suicide together at a given place and time. In England and Wales, for epidemiological purposes, people who have committed suicide within three days of each other in the same registration subdistrict are considered potential victims of a suicide pact.² A related phenomenon is homicide-suicide, in which a person commits a murder and then ends his . . . [Full text of this article]

South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, Adamson Centre for Mental Health, St Thomas's Hospital, London SE1 7EH (Sundararajan.Rajagopal@slam.nhs.uk)

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Biddle, L., Donovan, J., Hawton, K., Kapur, N., Gunnell, D. (2008). Suicide and the internet. BMJ 336: 800-802 [Full text]  
• Naito, A. (2007). Internet suicide in Japan: implications for child and adolescent mental health.. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 12: 583-597 [Abstract]  
• Miah, A. (2005). Genetics, cyberspace and bioethics: why not a public engagement with ethics?. Public Understanding of Science 14: 409-421 [Abstract]  
• Lee, D. T S, Chan, K. P M, Yip, P. S F (2005). Charcoal burning is also popular for suicide pacts made on the internet. BMJ 330: 602-602 [Full text]  

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