For fear or shame. Whatever the reason (a guilty conscience, the world is simply too much to bear, or unreasonable self-hatred) the character may be Driven To Suicide. This may be as little as pondering their existence or as much as holding a gun to one's head. Most times the character will have second thoughts, or will be talked down by a friend. But in shows where Anyone Can Die, the character may go through with it. In any case this is a powerful way to underscore the desperation of the character. In a backstory, being Driven To Suicide can illuminate the character's Dark And Troubled Past.

In some cases the reason for suicide may not be depression, but honor, as with ritual suicide. This obviously is more common in Japanese works (as in Japanese culture, traditionally suicide can be done to cleanse one's honor) than in Western ones (as in some Christian sects, suicide traditionally is a shameful act -- but classical settings allow it to be presented as honorable, e.g. in Shakespeare). It was also accepted by various ancient Greek philosophies, particularly that of the Stoics, as well as the ancient Romans and Egyptians; both of whom lauded it as a dignified and timely alternative to illness, dementia, or disgrace. Some Proud Warrior Races, such as the nomadic Scythians, preferred suicide as an alternative to dying in bed, thus making this trope Older Than Feudalism. By contrast, Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, et al.) abhor suicide, believing that only God is permitted to say when a life may be ended -- however, there is considerable debate over issues like terminal illness and capital punishment.

Sometimes this is done to deliver An Aesop about teen suicide by having Long Lost Uncle Aesop show up in a Very Special Episode.

At the other extreme, victims of The Corruption, Compelling Voice, or other forms of compulsion may resort to becoming a hero to prevent the monster they are about to become from being unleashed on the world. This may allow Dying As Yourself.

This is regularly played for laughs, despite being Dude Not Funny. Also incidentally, pushing someone into this is treated the same as premeditated first-degree murder in many countries. Unfortunately, minors can be total monsters to each other, and grave bullying at school or elsewhere often can have very sad consequences (the bully more often than not also gets off with a simple slap on the wrist, too).

Super Trope of Leave Behind A Pistol. See also: I Cannot Self Terminate, Suicide By Cop, Ate His Gun, Bath Suicide, Better To Die Than Be Killed, Goodbye Cruel World, Suicide By Sunlight and Murder Suicide. Contrast Face Death With Dignity, where one chooses to face the music (and the bullets); Bungled Suicide and Interrupted Suicide, where the character's attempt fails or is stopped by somebody else; Happily Failed Suicide, where the character is grateful to be alive after all, and Suicide Is Painless, where the character has no reason to commit suicide, but does so anyway.

This is a Death Trope, so expect spoilers, marked and unmarked.

Contents 1 Advertising 2 Anime & Manga 3 Comics 4 Fairy Tales 5 Film 6 Fan Fiction 7 Literature 8 Live Action TV 9 Music 10 Mythology 11 Newspaper Comics 12 Radio Drama 13 Real Life 14 Tabletop Games 15 Theater 16 Theme Parks 17 Video Games 18 Webcomics 19 Web Original 20 Western Animation 21 Other

Advertising Edit

• A recent "Stop global warming" ad shows CGI animals committing suicide. A chimp hangs himself. A polar bear jumps off the last ice berg. A kangaroo jumps in front of a train.

Anime & Manga Edit

Main article: Driven To Suicide/Anime And Manga

Comics Edit

• Green Lantern John Stewart nearly killed himself after being unable to stop the destruction of an inhabited planet (partly due to his own overconfidence). Martian Manhunter used reverse psychology to talk him out of it.
  • Black Hand killed himself (and his family) only to be raised as the first Black Lantern by Nekron and Scar, beginning the Blackest Night.
• Nny, the protagonist of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, regularly attempts to end his life, though he is always stopped by one thing or another. He does eventually end up killing himself... though he didn't mean to.
  • It was through a suicide machine designed to kill him when he answers his phone. Guess what happens for the first time ever?
• Yorick Brown of Y The Last Man ( yes, his father was a Shakespeare fan) becomes a subconscious Death Seeker out of survivor guilt after the Gender Cide. Culper Ring agent 711 tortures and abuses him until he's fully Driven To Suicide... but he has an epiphany and decides to live, which 711 reveals was the goal in the first place.
  • Alter also puts a gun to her head in one scene. She doesn't pull the trigger because Alter wants to die in combat and therefore only a man (Yorick) has the right to kill her. Alter's self-destructive actions are motivated by Survivor Guilt, most likely over the accidental death of her sister at the hands of the Israeli military.
• Wobbly-Headed Bob, a character created by Jhonen Vasquez is a Philosopher with a talent for driving the blissfully ignorant creatures of his world into suicide by telling them about how the world is supposed to be a crappy place and they're all stupid for being happy. He gets called out by this... To which he drives the critic to suicide as well. Nonetheless, it seems for the most part the suicide part is unintentional, with Bob merely trying to get others to wise up in his mind.
• Sunstreaker in "All Hail Megatron". After stupidly trusting Starscream and getting himself and his fellow Autobots stranded on Cybertron in imminent danger of death, and after watching Mirage beaten up in his place by Ironhide as a suspected traitor, Sunstreaker can't take it any more and just wants to die. Which he apparently does by detonating an explosive to destroy a bridge he's on while surrounded by the mutant Insecticon Swarm.
  • All Hail Megatron #14 indicated that he might have survived. {{spoiler|Ironhide #3 confirms it, though he's badly damaged and his mind really messed up. Understandable after what he's been through.]]
• After burying Spider-man alive, impersonating him, and defeating an enemy Spider-man couldn't, Kraven killed himself because after proving himself better than Spider-man in every way, he had defeated what was supposed to be the ultimate prey and had nothing left to hunt. Yes that's incredibly flawed logic, especially in the Marvel Universe, but Kraven was insane.
• Mr. Immortal from Great Lakes Avengers begun his suicidal streak after everyone loved to him had died. But due to his powers, he can't stay dead.
• Susan Smith of Funky Winkerbean attempted suicide when she realized that the teacher she had a crush on loved someone else. She's probably contemplating it again. Also had another character commit suicide when he realized he wouldn't make valedictorian. What is it with Batuik wanting smart people to kill themselves?
• Implied at the end of Ghost World. Enid feels completely isolated from everything and everyone she ever cared about; she is last seen catching a bus, a common metaphor for suicide.
• In Persepolis, Marjane attempts suicide. She recovers.
• In The Intimates, Dead Kid Fred attempts suicide out of depression and disgust at being a zombie. Punchy, who stumbled upon his LiveJournal and saw the warning signs, rushed to stop him, but it was later revealed that he wished he had been too late. Because then he would be a hero. That and he felt his "origin" wasn't up to snuff; his sister getting killed wasn't enough, he needed another tragedy to make him more credible as a superhero.
• In Love And Rockets, Tonantzin burns herself alive outside a US embassy somewhere in the world, as a result of depression manifesting as political despair.
• The newest series of X-Factor begins with Rictor standing on the ledge of a building, ready to jump, because he can't cope with the loss of of powers. He actually ends up getting pushed off by a dupe of Jamie Madrox's, but gets caught before he goes splat.
  • A similar situation happened to The Blob after the loss of his powers. He tried to slash his wrists, but was unable to find a vein amongst all the stretched out skin.
• Minuteman Jack "The Monster" Daw from 100 Bullets. He's addicted to self destructive tendencies: alcohol, heroin, and violence. He makes remarks about wanting to die yet he teases death with the needle or the gun as Graves puts it. The gun being a metaphor for violence. Jack got clean but he hasn't really changed since he keeps seeking the kick (violence) that diverts him from facing his pain. There is a moment where he avoids violence and seems to be getting better. Jack "relapses" (violence); kills a guard by squeezing his head with his foot followed by challenging candidate-minuteman Crete. Jack dies fighting crete when alligators devour them both. It shows us that he stayed married to his self destructive nature until the end.
  • Minuteman Milo "The Bastard" Garret. He earned that nickname by being the most ruthless of the minutemen. In sleeper mode he worked as a private detective and when he was reactivated he didn't like who he was. Disguised in bandageshe commits suicide by Lono, taunting and challenging him, pulling his famous knockout punches so Lono would kill him.
• In X-Men Noir, Warren Worthington jumped off the roof of Professor Xavier's reform school after learning the truth about Jean and just how twisted she really is. The X-Men are convinced the police did him in so they'd have an excuse to arrest Xavier; the police are convinced Xavier's tutelage drove him over the edge.
• Sharon Ventura, one of The Thing's love interests, attempts this twice - once after she becomes the She-Thing and again after thing Thing ends up rebuffing her advances when he learned that she nearly allied herself with Dr. Doom.
• In the Teen Titans spinoff Vigilante, after the deaths of several friends attempting to take up his mantle during a period of retirement and being unmasked on live TV lead to him becoming more angry, violent, paranoid and obsessed with dispensing justice not caring if he murders even innocent cops who get in his way, Adrian Chase (the title character) reaches this point by the end of the series. He succeeds as the final issue ends with Adrian shooting himself in his apartment.
• Carl Barks' "Dangerous Disguise" is probably the only Disney comic book story to ever show a character taking his own life - when a foreign spy fails his mission and realizes that his totalitarian leader will now send him to salt mines, he chooses to finish himself by jumping out of window.
  • ... except for an infamous series of Mickey Mouse comic strips (the idea for which was suggested by Walt himself!) in which Mickey attempts suicide several times after being dumped by Minnie (only to have each attempt comedically foiled).
• In All Fall Down, Portia experiences this when it becomes painfully clear she is never getting her powers back. She steps off a tall building. (She is saved by the Ghoul.)
• Superman foe Manchester Black killed himself with his own psychic powers after realizing that Superman was a true hero, which meant Black was the villain.

Fairy Tales Edit

• In Bearskin, when the hero, appalling shaggy, filthy and ragged, but rich, rescues a man from financial distress, the man promises that he may marry one of his daughters. Only the youngest is willing. However, his appearance stemmed from a Deal With The Devil, and that being over, he cleans up nicely, and the older sisters are reduced to envy and commit suicide. The Devil exults to the hero that he has got two souls instead of the one.
  • Other variants of this type of tale include Don Giovanni de la Fortuna, The Soldier and the Bad Man, The Road to Hell, The Reward of Kindness, The Devil As Partner and Never Wash.
• In The Young Slave, the heroine is so badly abused that she contemplates suicide. Fortunately, her uncle hears her lamenting her woes and saves her.
  • She began to weep, and wail, and lament, telling that inanimate piece of wood the story of her travails, speaking as she would have done to a living being; and perceiving that the doll answered not, she took up the knife and sharpening it on the pumice-stone, said, 'If thou wilt not answer me, I shall kill myself, and thus will end the feast;' and the doll swelled up as a bag-pipe, and at last answered, 'Yes, I did hear thee, I am not deaf.'

Film Edit

• Phil in Groundhog Day tries several methods of suicide, presumably out of boredom after being forced to relive the same day of his life so many times in a row. Among the methods he tries are: jumping off a building, stepping in front of a speeding bus, a fiery high-speed chase ending in a car crash and dropping a toaster into his bath tub. And while all of these actually succeed, it does not stop him from waking up alive every morning on February 2.
• In The Quiet Earth, most of the world's population has disappeared thanks to a mysterious experiment, and one person who felt responsible for the disaster chose suicide over living with the guilt. The twist here is that the man who committed suicide is the main character, and he survives to wander in an empty world, consumed by guilt and loneliness, because he succeeded at killing himself at the exact moment that the world ended.
• Jericho Cane in End Of Days contemplates suicide every Christmas because his wife and daughter were killed while doing his job.
• George Bailey in Its A Wonderful Life: Every golden opportunity is frustrated by his self-imposed duties, until one Christmas Eve, when Potter seizes an opportunity to steal $8,000 from the Bailey Building & Loan, then threatens to charge George with the theft. He is saved by his guardian angel as he contemplates jumping off a bridge.
  • Ironically, he ends up jumping off the bridge anyway to save said guardian angel.
• In Lost And Delirious, Paulie jumps off the school roof after Tori rejects her
• In The Godfather Part II Frank Pentangelli is presented with this option as an honorable way to make up for his betrayal. He graciously takes it.
• In The Shawshank Redemption, {{spoiler|the elderly inmate Brooks, after being in prison for more that 50 years, is finally let out. Unfortunately, the world outside of the prison is too much for the old man to handle after being locked away for so long, so he hangs himself in his bedroom in]] [[TearJerker one of the saddest scenes in film history}}.
  • Also, at the film's climax,Warden Norton, realizing he could potentially spend the rest of his life in his own prison for illicit money-handling, pulls a gun from his desk drawer and shoots himself.
• In Spartacus, Gracchus and Crassus are mortal enemies in the Roman Senate. When Gracchus sees that Crassus has destroyed Spartacus's slave army, after having used it as a tool to destabilize Crassus's power base, he hires someone to free Spartacus's wife Varinia and then releases both her and her newborn son from slavery. To keep Crassus from striking back at him, he commits suicide, thereby securing the last laugh.
• At the beginning of Timecop Max Walker confronts a time criminal messing with Wall Street during the black Thursday of '29. To keep the Big Bad from harming his family the criminal decides to take his own life instead and jumps out of a window. Max Walker follows and saves him by jumping back to his time period. He is then sentenced to death for his time meddling. Great, well, the execution is applied by sending him back to the point where he was saved, thus joining all the brokers who committed suicide during the great crash.
• Dead Poets Society: Neil realizes his father will never accept his vocation and shoots himself in the head.
  • Neil's "vocation" is acting. Back then, a lot of people assumed that men in the theater were gay. We're not sure whether Neil's father suspects his son might be gay, or just fears that dabbling in theater might turn him gay-- or is just afraid of what people might think-- he decides to send him to a military academy to straighten him out-- and keep him away from show biz influences. We're left to draw our own conclusions about how much vocation, sexuality, and a bad relationship with his father-- that his father would make assumptions without talking to him is pretty awful, but also standard for the time-- played into his decision.
• In Better Off Dead this was a major characteristic of one of the main characters, who attempts suicide multiple times in many different ways. {{spoiler|He's never successful]].
• Airplane!. Three people commit suicide rather than listen to Ted Striker's reminiscing.
• In the 1978 Dawn Of The Dead, Peter contemplates committing suicide but changes his mind as he rushes off to the helicopter to the sound of heroic music. So he can live a life in a world covered by zombies, yay. The original script had Peter kill himself but Executive Meddling called for a "happier" ending.
  • In the remake of the movie Michael gets bitten and, after getting the other survivors away on a boat, shoots himself.
• The Harold Lloyd film Never Weaken revolves entirely around his multiple suicide attempts after being jilted. Since they all play out in Lloyd's typical "thrill comedy" style, and we know there's no way he'll actually succeed, it's okay to laugh.
• This is played for laughs in the 1971 Hal Ashby film Harold And Maude, where the death-obsessed protagonist stages elaborate faux-suicides out of boredom.
  • Until his friend Maude really (and cheerfully) does it, saying 80 is the right age and she's lived a long, full life.
• In Diary Of The Dead Mary attempts to shoot herself in the head after she thinks she killed three people; they're zombies however. She misses her brain causing her to bleed to death while the other characters attempt to save her life. There is something so sad about a failed suicide too.
• Mel Gibson plays a self-destructive cop in Lethal Weapon, distraught over the death of his wife. At one point Riggs nearly Ate His Gun, and tells Murtaugh that every morning when he wakes up he makes a decision whether to off himself or not.
• The Happening: Plants start secreting chemicals which drive people to suicide.
• 28 Days Later. Appropriately enough, the Despair Event Horizon having been crossed long, long ago, only the promise of women seems to have pulled several of the soldiers away from this, particularly Jones. Many others prior to him had probably gone through with it, as the main character's parents had, preferring to die rather than flee from the infected or end up insane and slaughtering their loved ones.
• John Constantine was driven to suicide at an early age because he saw demonically-possessed people, managed to get himself just dead enough to count as a successful suicide by Heaven's standards, and spent the rest of his life trying to earn a Get Out of Hell Free Card. He eventually gets it by killing himself again (and then Satan screws him by making him better). This is different from the comic book character's story and motivation.
• Happens on several occasions in the movie Sunshine (2007), which takes place on a spaceship trying to avert the end of the world by re-igniting the Sun. Trey cuts his wrists when he makes an elementary mistake (forgetting to realign the heat shield) that causes the death of several crewmembers. The ship's psychiatrist Searle follows the example of the crew of Icarus II and fully opens the observation portal to the Sun, incinerating himself rather than facing a slow death from asphyxiation.
• Though she doesn't actually carry it out, in Serenity, River is shown putting a gun to her head while in the middle of her absolute rock-bottom mental breakdown, complete with her begging Simon to put a bullet in her, because she is terrified of what the Operative will do to the rest of the crew to get to her.
  • River: Put a bullet to me... Bullet in the brainpan, squish.
• The entire plot of the 1996 film It's My Party is based on this very premise. Nick Stark, who is dying of AIDS, decides to throw himself a grand farewell party and invites all of his friends and family to say goodbye, as he intends to kill himself at the end of the party weekend by taking an overdose of pills.
• In CSA Confederate States Of America, John Ambrose Fauntroy V is accused of having black ancestry. Since the CSA is a Crapsack World where anyone with colored heritage is enslaved, he opts to shoot himself rather than risk it.
• In the 2007 remake of Halloween, after Michael kills a nurse at the institution he's in after killing his older sister, her boyfriend, and his step-dad, his mom commits suicide by gunshot to the head.
• Occurs in An Officer And A Gentleman when Sid Worley drops out of the Navy Aviator program to marry his pregnant girlfriend. After she reveals the pregnancy was faked and she only want to marry an airman, he hangs himself in a motel shower stall.
• Shutter Island has a slight variation; at the end of the film, a "cured" Andrew Laeddis fakes relapsing into his delusion so that the doctors will lobotomize him. This is essentially a suicide without death, as it will destroy his memories and personality, and he chooses it over living with his guilt about the fate of his wife and children.
• Towards the end of The King And The Clown when Jaeng-sang is blinded Gong-gil is Driven To Suicide. But is interrupted. But then they both commit suicide upon his recovery. It's that kind of film.
• Towards the end of Sherlock Holmes Dr. Watson and Mary were getting ready to leave and Dr. Watson had to see Sherlock. He reassured Mary that Sherlock had no problem with him leaving to marry her. They entered Sherlock's room to see that he had hung himself. Dr. Watson knew that Sherlock would never kill himself and woke him up by poking him with his cane. It turns out that he was just testing out how Blackwood managed to survive being hung in the first place. He ended up getting stuck.
• At the end of Titanic, we learn that Cal apparently shot himself]] after losing everything in the Great Depression.
• Bedazzled begins with Stanley, depressed over his miserable life, especially his inability to talk to the woman he loves, trying to hang himself - and failing at that too.
• In the 2007 film Beowulf, the King in the story kills himself after Beowulf has succeed killing his bastard son made with a monster. Beowulf however is by some standards Too Dumb To Live, seeing what the King's fooling around did, but nonetheless strikes a bargain with the monster and makes her another baby. Being also too proud to kill himself, he dies in a redeeming Heroic Sacrifice.
• At the end of Burnt By The Sun, Dmitri "Mitya" Arsentiev slits his wrists in the bathtub of his flat.
• In Advise and Consent, Senator Brigham Anderson commits suicide just before the vote on the Secretary of State nomination. A rival senator tries to blackmail Anderson into changing his "no" vote by threatening to expose a past homosexual affair he had.
• In Inception, after living through so many layers of dreams, Dom's wife Mal believed that reality was also a dream and jumped off a building to "kick" herself back to reality.
• In Mary Poppins, after Mr. Banks is {{spoiler|fired from his job]] and has disappeared, one of his domestic staff speculates he's thrown himself into the Thames. When he then reappears alive...
  • Mrs. Banks: Oh, George, you didn't jump into the river! How sensible of you!
  • Constable Jones: (on the phone) It's alright, sir; he's been found. (beat) No, alive.
• In The Room, throughout the film, main character Johnny is cheated on by his fiancee with his best friend. Response? Throw a fit and eat a bullet.
• The film version of The Fountainhead departs from the novel by having Gail Wynand blow his brains out at the end.
• In Twelve and Holding, Jeff, one of the boys who accidentally killed Rudy, kills himself while in juvie.
• The entire premise of Wristcutters A Love Story. The only characters who didn't kill themselves are Kneller, who is one of the Powers That Be and McCall who accidentally overdosed.
• Mannen som elsket Yngve (The Man who Loved Yngve). Jarle's sudden attack at a party, caused by internalized homophobia and the stress of being in love with two people at the same time, one of them secretly, combines with underlying mental health problems to send Yngve jumping off a bridge. He survives, but ends up in mental hospital.
• Jordy in MysteryTeam mentioned that he planned on working at the convenience store until this happened. The fact that he's still alive is his idea of happiness.
• Amanda Krueger killed herself after seeing news reports of how the rape-conceived son she'd given up for adoption had been arrested for murdering children.
• In A Murderer And His Child, the Villain Protagonist is an otherwise decent man who, once every 6 months or so, gets an irresistible urge to rape and murder a preteen girl. Then he marries a women who has a 9-year-old daughter. When he notices that he starts imagining killing that girl (who by then has completely opened up to him and would be an easy victim), he kills himself.
• Al B in House Of 9.
• Battle Royale begins with Shuya's father hanging himself before the events of the movie, and doesn't let up any time soon. During the events of the BR program, many students kill themselves out of despair, fear, and to avoid murdering others; Kazuhiko and Sakura jump off a cliff together, Yoji and Yoshimi hang themselves with the former's rope, and Yuko throws herself from the lighthouse after accidentally poisoning Yuka (and, in extension, causing the rest of her friends to shoot each other out of the resulting paranoia). Averted with Shinji, who attempts a Taking You With Me attack at Kiriyama after he murders his friends.
• The Michael Haneke film The Seventh Continent is a very realistic portrayal of suicide, and largely focuses on the emptiness of the central family's life.
• Subverted and played straight with Colonel Maguire in
• In Master And Commander, the oldest midshipman Hollom is believed by the rest of the crew to be cursed with bringing all kinds of bad luck to the ship. After a series of events involving the crew's disrespect becoming clearer and clearer to him, Hollom picks up a small cannonball and jumps off the ship to drown.
• In The Raid, Lieutenant Wahyu tries to shoot himself after shooting Tama, believing that there was no point to the operation after all and not wanting to be turned in to the police. Unfortunately for him, his revolver had run out of bullets.

Fan Fiction Edit

• In My Immortal, Draco commits suicide at one point, leading Ebony to attempt the same. Draco is alive the next time he's mentioned.
• In MGLN Crisis, Raquel Benna commits suicide after telling Fate the truth about her origins, not wanting Fate to have to arrest her.
• Shockingly enough, this happens to Meta Knight in The Dream Land Story. His one goal was to destroy Dark Matter, and kills himself after Kirby beats him to the job.
• Inner Demons: After Queen!Twilight Sparkle cements her Face Heel Turn, Fluttershy is left so far past the Despair Event Horizon that she attempts to throw herself off a cliff. Fortunately, Big Mac shows up in time to stop her, and her talks her down.
• In the fanfic The Best Night Ever, Prince Blueblood goes through a phase where he kills himself in ever more elaborate ways due to Sanity Slippage caused by being trapped in a Groundhog Day Loop that forces him to relive the day of the disastrous Grand Galloping Gala over and over and over again.
• The plot point in the infamous Axis Powers Hetalia fanfiction Behind the Mask.

Literature Edit

• Happens to quite a few of H.P. Lovecraft's characters after surviving some form of Cosmic Horror or another. The narrator of Dagon is one example, as is the protagonist's uncle in The Shadow Over Innsmouth after learning of the family's monstrous heritage.
• The character Cass Anders shoots himself in the Callahans Crosstime Saloon short story "Fivesight" because he sees the future, but cannot change it or what he tries to prevent ends even more disastrously. He crossed his Despair Event Horizon when he foresees but fails to prevent his stepson's death by car accident.
• In Piers Anthony's Incarnations Of Immortality novel On a Pale Horse, after thoroughly screwing himself over with several bad decisions, Zane decides to kill himself. (He gets better when he winds up killing and replacing Death.)
• This was how Brave New World ended, the protagonist who never had a happy life at his old place but adopted their beliefs moved with Bernard back to London which like all the world except where he came from and maybe the islands (unless those fall under Released Somewhere Else) is a Crapsaccharine World where there is no free will and everybody is on drugs all the time.John eventually undergoes a Heroic BSOD which eventually makes him go against everything he believed in and cave into the peer pressure.He hangs himself in an act of honor.
• In House Of The Scorpion, Tam Lin drinks wine only he knew was poisoned as an atonement for planting a bomb that accidentally killed twenty schoolkids.
• In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Catherine purposefully makes herself sick (and later dies) just to spite the two men who love her.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's Chessman of Mars, O-Tar is handed the dagger when they would replace him with his son as jeddak, because "There can be but one jeddak in Manator."
• In G.K. Chesterton's Paradise of Thieves, Father Brown discovers that someone was carrying a bottle of poison. Discovering who is it takes a little longer.
• Trilby has the titular character, having left her friends and supporters out of shame, contemplate throwing herself into the Seine; at the last moment she gives up and returns to her evil mentor Svengali. She doesn't say whether that's worse or not.
• In Darkness Visible it is eventually revealed that the incident at the Marsh house was not a random attack. After years of brutal abuse by her husband, Mrs Marsh told the Dark Tide to open the Thresholds, knowing it would kill her, and intending that it would Mercy Kill her children at the same time.
• Famed mystery novelist Agatha Christie uses this trope a few times:
  • In And Then There Were None, Vera Claythorne is Driven To Suicide.
  • In The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, the killer is found dead of an overdose after The Reveal. It is implied in the book that this was actually because the killer's spouse had done it to prevent further murders.
  • In the two Hercule Poirot Same Story Different Names short stories "The Market Basing Mystery" and "Murder in the Mews", the supposed murder victim was actually Driven To Suicide, and someone close to them dressed the scene up as a murder to punish the person they felt was morally responsible for the death.
  • The Mr. Quin stories have lovers in dire straits as an integral part of the premise; consequently a disproportionate number of them include somebody admitting, explicitly or tacitly, that when Mr. Quin took a hand in their problem they were this close to ending it all. The central character of "Harlequin's Lane" goes through with it in the end; when it comes to love, not all problems have a neat solution that includes everybody.
• In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Smerdyakov commits suicide close to the end of the novel. Why he does is left unexplained and up to the reader. He either did it because he had a sudden attack of conscience over everything he had done which is unlikely, or more likely he committed suicide as the final part of a hastily-schemed Gambit Roulette to put Dmitri Karamazov in jail for the murder of his father, for which he was innocent.
• Fernand Mondego in The Count Of Monte Cristo.
• Raoul de Bragelonne in The Man In The Iron Mask commits suicide by Algerians after being dumped by his girlfriend.
• In Lord Dunsany's short story The Jest of the Gods, the title characters created a king's soul containing more pride, strength, and ambition than kings ordinarily had, then sent the soul to be born as a slave. Their jest backfired when the soul grew up and was Driven To Suicide, which they hadn't expected. Leads to a Crowning Moment Of Awesome when he then faces them down.
• Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar attempts suicide a number of times before being hospitalized. Given the time period (The Fifties), Esther is terrified of the common reality that a married woman spends the rest of her life in the kitchen and giving up everything she ever worked towards. After finishing college, she has no idea what to do with her life and becomes saddened by the fact that "the one thing [she] was good at was winning scholarships and prizes and that era is coming to an end." After trying to slit her wrists in a warm bath and trying to swim out into the ocean, she crawls into a hole in her basement and downs a bottle of sleeping pills.
• In Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas, Odd's mother, who is incapable of any responsibility whatsoever, threatens suicide with a gun any time anyone asks her something she doesn't want to deal with. She does this even to Odd as a child, which is certainly emotional abuse.
  • Well, if that isn't abuse, putting the barrel of the gun to his eye so he could see the bullet, and threatening to kill him, certainly is.
• In Stephen King's IT, Stan Uris breaks and is Driven To Suicide when faced with the prospect of returning to the Town With A Dark Secret.
  • Dayna Jurgens from The Stand impales her neck on a piece of glass to prevent Flagg from interrogating her. Nadine Cross also does this to prevent Flagg's offspring from being born, and she's probably Ax Crazy by this point.
• In CS Lewis's The Horse And His Boy, Aravis decides to commit suicide to escape the marriage her Wicked Stepmother arranged. Fortunately, her horse Hwin stops her, and she runs away with Hwin to Narnia instead.
• At the opening of Garth Nix's Lirael, the title character decides to commit suicide at the age of fourteen, having not received the Sight and therefore still a child in her cloistered world. She climbs to a ledge in a Paperwing (airplane) hangar to jump to her doom. She is stopped when a Paperwing arrives, and witnesses the ensuing plot-relevant conversation. The other Clayr find her and deduce what she was doing. They convince her that there is still hope she will gain the Sight, and promptly erase her memory of the plot-relevant conversation.
  • She tried again in the ensuing years, but was talked out of it by her companion, the Disreputable Dog.
• Applied with a twist in Edward Arlington Robinson's famous Richard Cory. The bulk of the poem is a glowing but superficial description of the regal title character. In the final line, he shoots himself without warning or explanation; we see the suicide, but (uncommonly in fiction) we receive little sense of why he was driven to it.
• In Les Miserables, the original Inspector Javert can't accept that the same Jean Valjean whom he has chased for years has just spared his life and freed him; the cognitive dissonance eventually overwhelms him and he drowns himself.
• In Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories, particularly the earlier novels, this is a convenient way of disposing of those responsible for tragedies without the need for a trial.
  • Whose Body?: The killer writes out a detailed confession in a long suicide note addressed to Lord Peter, but is arrested before the suicide can actually take place.
  • Clouds of Witness: The victim was actually a suicide whose only note was a letter to his ex-mistress, who didn't bother to read it properly. Much later, in Gaudy Night, Lord Peter indirectly refers to this case as the time when he appeared to have the choice between hanging his brother or his sister; Harriet Vane said that in one of her own mystery stories, etiquette would demand a written confession, followed by poison for two in the library.
  • The Dawson Pedigree (a.k.a. Unnatural Death): The killer commits suicide in jail at the end of the story.
  • The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club: The killer is persuaded to write out a confession and commit suicide at the end of the story.
  • Murder Must Advertise: The killer of the first victim - the person that Lord Peter originally set out to find - commits Suicide By Criminal as an alternative to trial and conviction.
  • Arguably, this happens in The Nine Tailors.
• In Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands, the egocentric killer opts for a dramatic suicide and a long-winded suicide note to a Scotland Yard investigator, assuming that the murder has been a perfect murder that could not have been detected or proved and wanting to go out in a blaze of glory. Wrong on all counts, as it happened.
• In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings Denethor attempts to burn himself and his son on a funeral pyre when he believes the battle against Sauron is hopeless, and that his son is dying through his own fault. He succeeds in killing himself, but his son is saved just in time.
  • Eowyn also rides into battle wanting to die after being convinced that she'll spend the rest of her life taking care of her declining uncle as the House of Eorl becomes more and more dishonorable.
  • Happens several times in The Silmarillion:
    • Fingolfin challenges Morgoth to single combat (he does pretty well, but there was no way he was going to win, and he's smart enough that he must have known that);
    • Nienor finds out that she's married to and pregnant by her long-lost brother, and jumps off a cliff;
    • Túrin finds out that he's married and impregnated his sister (and that killing all those other people may also have been a mistake), and doesn't so much fall on his sword as politely ask it to kill him;
    • Húrin, who has been forced to watch his son marry and impregnate his daughter and both of them commit suicide (and finding his wife again after decades of separation only to have her die almost immediately), despairs and casts himself off a cliff;
    • Elwing jumps off another cliff although she survives, carrying a Silmaril, while Maedhros was attacking her city to get it;
    • And later on, Maedhros realizes that killing all those people was definitely a mistake, and jumps off a fourth cliff. This is after a much earlier I Cannot Self Terminate moment while he was hanging off a different cliff.
• In The Bible, having lost a battle as well as his beloved eldest son Jonathan, King Saul falls on his sword when his armor bearer refuses to kill him, figuring it would be better to die by his own hand than to be mistreated and killed by the Philistines.
  • Samson prays that God will give him strength to bring down the Philistine temple -- and that he will die there and so escape.
  • Racked with guilt for having betrayed Jesus, Judas Iscariot returned the reward money and hanged himself. (Matt 27:3-5)
  • When an earthquake struck the jail at Phillippi, the keeper of the prison was going to kill himself, thinking the prisoners had fled, and he knew he'd probably die if that happened. He was stopped by Paul, one of the prisoners.
• The legendary Roman matron Lucretia, most famously memorialized in Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece, commits suicide after being raped.
• In Atlas Shrugged, after Cheryl Taggart realizes that her husband is evil and willing to destroy anything she would achieve for her own interest, and that the world is ruled by people just like him, she races to sthrow herself into a river.
• In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel Cain's Last Stand, when Donal's freedom from mind control is lost as Jurgen steps away, he turns his gun on himself rather than attack Cain. Later, the Battle Sisters whom Varan brought to his meeting with Cain are also freed by Jurgen's nearness, go insane realizing what they have done under his influence, and commit suicide.
• In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40000 Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, when they go through certain tunnels in the Eye of Terror, their thoughts are filled with murder and suicide; Pasanius starts to kill himself before Uriel realizes the attack and encourages them to break free.
  • The Killing Ground opens with a former soldier trying to drown his sorrows. He ends up blowing his brains out as more effective.
  • In the Horus Heresy novel Fulgrim, Serena d'Angelus realizes that her Bad Dreams stem from murders she committed and forgot. She seeks out Ostian, thinking he could save her. She finds him murdered, weeps that he loved her and she hadn't seen it, and that she loved him. Then she commits suicide.
    • Later, Fulgrim realizes how great his betrayal is when he kills Ferrus Manus. He goes to kill himself. His sword says it's too noble for him, and tricks him into accepting possession.
• In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40000 Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, when Ragnar and Torin speculate about the causes of the slow turn to wulfen encroaching on their minds, Ragnar thinks it may be his influence. Torin dissuades him, and is not amused when Ragnar says that actually, it would be much better if he could end it by shooting himself.
• In James Swallow's Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, when the second Last Stand looks even more devastated than the apparent first, Turcio speaks of their defeat. Only when Arkio offers him a knife to cut his throat with does Turcio rouse himself to fight again.
  • In Deus Sanguinius, Inquisitor Stele plays on Rafen's fears -- that he overshadows his younger brother and is jealous of him -- to convince him that he has to free Arkio by killing himself. Only a literal vision allows him to throw off the mind-witchery.
• In The Tragedy Of Man, Adam is on the verge of jumping off a cliff in the last scene. He is stopped when Eve tells him she is pregnant.
• In Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40000 novel Angels of Darkness, the Dark Angels are trapped in a fortress because if they leave it, they will release a horrific virus on the planet and its population, but their suits can not last as long as the virus. They fear what desperation will make them do and think it better to die together, quickly, so they each hold a bomb and have Boreas push the denotator to kill them all.
• Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, thanks to a manipulative Nurse Ratched threatening him and bringing him back to reality.
• This trope applies to the story of {{spoiler|The Bloody Baron]] from Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, who did precisely this after killing his lover, The Gray Lady, in a fit of rage. Both of them return as ghosts afterward.
  • From the same book, Hermione points out that the wizard or witch who split his/her own soul to create a Horcrux must feel deep and genuine remorse in order to fix their soul fragments back into one whole piece. The drawback? Said wizard or witch may be overwhelmed by the pain of it to end up with this trope.
• Quentin Compson in The Sound and The Fury commits suicide because he's unable to cope with living in a world where he doesn't belong anymore. Quentin was born and raised on the values of the Old South, particularly about how women are suppose to be virtuous and upstanding. He begins to lose touch with reality when his older sister, Candace, begins to sleep around, destroying his aforementioned belief of women, his father preaches nihilism, and sees the Old South fading away.
• In Lonesome Dove, After the town has become a ghost town, Xavier tragically locks himself into the barroom and then burns it down so he can't escape out of loneliness.
• In Isaac Asimov's story "All The Troubles Of The World", Multivac comes uncomfortably close to destruction because of a seemingly random act -- a potential disaster considering how much of the work of maintaining civilization has been dumped onto the computer. The story ends with Multivac being asked what it itself wants, and replying "i wish to die" -- implying that the "random act" was a suicidal plan by Multivac that failed... this time.
• An alarming number of John Le Carré's novels end with characters killing themselves, or deliberately allowing themselves to be killed.
  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ends with Alec Leamas allowing himself to be shot by East German border guards rather than escaping after his girlfriend is killed.
  • A Perfect Spy ends with Magnus Pym shooting himself in the bath.
  • Harry Palfrey, the narrator of The Russia House, throws himself in front of a bus in The Night Manager.
  • In The Tailor of Panama, Harry Pendel wanders out into the night, with every intention of being killed by invading US forces.
  • The Constant Gardener ends with Justin Quayle arranging things so that he will be killed in the same place by the same people who killed his wife.
• In the Dragonriders Of Pern series, the mental bond between a dragon and its rider is so strong that, should one die, the other almost invariably commits suicide shortly afterward. In the rare cases where the rider does not kill himself, he's left as an Empty Shell.
• The book Seventeen deals with a seventeen year old girl who decides to kill herself in seven days if her life doesn't improve. Her best friend abandons her to become a model, her other friend is raped, she's convinced that she's never been good at anything except diving, and her boyfriend dumps her on the side of the road when she refuses to sleep with him. She goes straight to a bridge and jumps off. Halfway down, she changes her mind, puts her diving training into use, and swims to shore. The book ends without telling us if her life improves.
• Brought up in one Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel. See, the Eighth Doctor of the novels is even more of a Cloudcuckoolander than the Doctor usually is, and sometimes cannot tell the difference between TV and movies and Real Life. There's "a popular British Soap Opera" (likely East Enders) which, if he watched it while in such a confused state, even after all the horrifying things he's seen traveling through time and space which have mostly only ever upset him a little, would so thoroughly convince him of "the sheer futility and misery of life" that he'd try to kill himself.(Note: This comes up in a footnote, which is worded oddly, so it's not clear if he's ever gone so far as to try doing away with himself when faced with the endless tragedy that is life in Walford.)
• In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, deaf-mute John Singer shoots himself in the chest after learning of the death of his best friend, Spiros Antonopoulos.
• At the end of Dreamspeaker, Peter hangs himself, while the mute "He who would Sing" shoots himself in the mouth with a shotgun, in gruesome detail.
• A famous example: in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther shoots himself in the head to escape an unbearable love triangle (he is in love with a married woman). A semi-Bungled Suicide, in that he does not die instantly, but suffers for twelve hours before finally dying.
• In I Shall Wear Midnight by Mr. Petty, who was Driven To Suicide after he went on a drunken rampage and bludgeoned his pregnant thirteen-year-old daughter and caused her to miscarry. Fortunately Tiffany arrives in time.
• In Robert E Howard's Conan The Barbarian story "Shadows In The Moonlight, Olivia tries to escape by telling her pursuer that she will drown herself if he comes after; he tells her the waters are too shallow.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, in the BackStory, Miranda had thought of killing herself when she thought Ferdinard had jilted her.
• In the Gaunts Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt, Sabbatine Cirk kills herself with a poisoned dart due to having sold out the Gereon resistance to the Inquisition.
• In Tad Williams's Memory Sorrow And Thorn, reading Nisses' book will push you over the Despair Event Horizon and make you wish you were dead. The first person to read it flung himself out a window. The only other person we know to have read it was driven from a position of happiness and power to a life of wandering begging and shame and despair.
• The overwhelming majority of vampires from The Vampire Chronicles end up this way, because they can't handle the continuous changes in human mindset and lifestyle.
• Played For Laughs in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. In the book's climax, the Heart of Gold's crew was being fired upon by intergalactic police. {{spoiler|Then the cops suddenly died for no apparent reason. As it turned out, Marvin had been talking to the other ship's computer giving it his views on the universe. The computer then committed suicide taking the cops out with it.]]
• Officer Ennis at the end of FromABuick8. Just couldn't take his life anymore. It's speculated that the Buick may have had something to do with it, but it's unlikely.
• Michael, in the Knight And Rogue Series, after developing fullblown magic and getting chased by a mob into a ice cold river during winter. When he pulls himself out he decides that, as a magic using freak, it might actually be better if he dies. Thankfully, he's rescued and convinced that there's nothing wrong with him before this idea can have any time to grow.
• Things Fall Apart ends with Okonkwo hanging himself, unable to handle the changes wrought by the arrival of the Europeans.
• Sammy's suicide in the final year of high school in The Book Of Joe has a huge impact on the lives of the characters around him and the novel essentially follows how his best friend is still struggling to deal with it, years since the event.
• Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Lethal Justice reveals that an elderly couple did this after Arden Gillespie and Roland Sullivan sucked up all their money. Isabelle Flanders admits that when everything around her just went to hell, she was one step away from committing suicide before Nikki Quinn came into her life. Hokus Pokus implies that Maggie Spritzer was on the verge of this, but Jack Emery intervened before anything really bad happened.
• In Rick Cook's Limbo System, Ludenemeyer does this to avoid capture with his knowledge. Later, Jenkins implies to DeRosa that Dr. Takiuji had to agree to do this if need be to avoid capture {{spoiler|to hide from spies that his actual plan was to substitute someone else for Takiuji and so prevent their having his knowledge.]]
• Howard Van Horn does this is the Ellery Queen novel Ten Days' Wonder. This leads Ellery to prematurely conclude that the case is over.
• A particularly manipulative example in The Monk Matilda swears that if she can't have Ambrosio or at least be near him, she will kill herself. This threat goes away later for reasons unexplained after he beds her.
• In John C Wright's Count to a Trillion, Captain Grimaldi {{spoiler|At least according to Blackie]]
• In Enchantress From The Stars Elana, a 14 years old girl from The Federation, is captured by colonists from The Empire. The colonists intend to bring her to their home planet, where she will be dissected and interrogated (and thanks to their tech, The Empire can extract any information they want). Not wanting to end like this, Elana runs towards the imperial rock-chever, intent on being crushed by falling debris. luckily, she is rescued Just In Time

Live Action TV Edit

• In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, Boomer begins having suicidal thoughts when she begins to suspect that she's a Cylon, and Baltar - who knows for a fact that she is - pushes her over the edge, causing her to shoot herself. She ends up jerking the gun away and letting the bullet pass through her cheek, leading her to wonder later whether her programming prevented her from killing herself until after her mission was accomplished, or if she was just a lousy shot.
  • In later seasons, this also happens. Dualla does this after returning from the nuked Earth. In the finale Brother Cavil, upon seeing that his plans have been ruined, simply yells "FRAK!", shoves a gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger.
    • That last one is subject to Alternative Character Interpretation: Cavil had gotten so used to resurrection that he instinctively tried to suicide as a Villain Exit Stage Left. In the heat of the moment, he completely forgot that he couldn't resurrect anymore. Oops.
  • D'Anna Biers is Driven To Suicide for a different reason: After her first death, she becomes obsessed with the "place between life and death" and begins to kill herself... over and over in hopes of glimpsing into something she isn't supposed to know.
    • She gets an actual an actual one after the Fleet comes across the nuked remains of Earth. She chooses to stay behind and presumably dies. Since she was the only living Number Three at the time, this action also ends her line.
• A favorite tactic of the First Evil on Buffy The Vampire Slayer is to use its shapeshifting powers to play mind games to trick heroes into destroying themselves. It actually talked potential Slayer Chloe into hanging herself in "Get It Done".
  • Spike also tried to kill himself after he got chipped.
• In Dexter, a psychiatrist causes the deaths of his clients by withdrawing their medication and then encouraging them to kill themselves.
  • Also, Dexter's adoptive father Harry killed himself after witnessing the results of training his son to be a vigilante murder machine.
• On Doctor Who a Dalek chose to blow itself up rather than become tainted with human DNA. The only time the word " EXTERMINATE" could ever be turned into a Tear Jerker.
  • Also, Amy in "Amy's Choice" after Rory dies in the dream world. Although Amy, the Doctor, and Rory are given a choice between two worlds and must figure out which is real, Amy chose Leadworth as the false world while having no way of knowing because either way she’d be with Rory, saying if this was reality, she didn't want it (the only way to leave the false world is to die. Die in the false world, wake up in reality; ask what happens if you die in reality. (Note:You die, stupid. That's why it's called "reality.") She basically smashes her car into a wall at maximum speed to be with Rory.
  • It's heavily implied in "Turn Left" that the Doctor simply let himself drown with the Racnoss when Donna wasn't there.
  • In The Sun Makers, Leela spots the first person they see on Pluto -- going to throw himself over the building side.
  • And then there's Adelaide Brooke in "The Waters of Mars" who committed suicide because her death was a fixed point in time necessary to ensure the spacefaring future of the human race.
• Scrubs has Ted, the hospital's lawyer, who is eternally depressed and contemplating suicide. Typically he stays on the roof of the building, looking down, waiting to gain enough courage to take the final step, often while Dr. Kelso watches in sadistic amusement. Something always happens that prevents him from jumping, to Kelso's chagrin... except one time when he's about to turn back, but accidentally falls down (Dr. Kelso came up onto the roof blasting an air horn, the surprise causing him to fall). He survives as he lands on a large pile of garbage bags the Almighty Janitor had put there (the whereabouts of which had been part of another plot). Who then gives Ted advice on a location to 'jump' from that will be successful.
  • Elliot also confesses that she once tried to drown herself, although this wasn't played for laughs. It was actually mostly ignored after that episode, as all the characters became generic sitcom characters.
    • Slightly before the aforementioned was, however, played for laughs. Elliot admitted that she didn't try to stick her head in an oven. When her head gets really hot, she pisses herself and she didn't want to be found in a puddle of her own urine.
  • Dr. Cox unknowingly transplants rabies-infected organs into 3 patients, killing them and driving him to nearly drink himself to death.
• In the Charmed episode "Murphy's Luck", a darklighter tries to drive a future whitelighter to suicide, since the only way to keep a person from becoming a whitelighter is to have them take their own life. Then he turns his powers on one of the main characters...
  • Later on, Cole wanted to kill himself and had tried many times but can't because he's too powerful.
  • Leading to a great line, Cole (conjuring a guillotine): I can't wait to see how I survive this.
• On The Colbert Report, Stephen illustrated the 'mixed messages' within a Presidential speech by playing a series of clips, then cutting back to the desk in between. Good news - "Yaaay!" Bad news - "Boooo." Good news - sucks on cigar. Bad news - sucks on gun barrel. (Luckily, the next clip was good enough to dissuade him from going through with it.) This upset a few fans...
• Lost is a fairly suicide-heavy show. In addition to Sawyer's father's murder-suicide (in flashbacks), we've seen Locke, Jack, and Michael on the verge of suicide. In Jack and Locke's cases, they were interrupted before actually making the attempt. Michael tried at least three times unsuccessfully. Richard has also tried, but his immortality also extends to a inability to kill himself.
• Happens to more or less half the cast of Rome, in some cases because a character is based on a historical figure who took their own life. Some of the more notable ones include: The death of Niobe, who throws herself off a balcony so that Vorenus won't have to take her life in season one, the fate of both Antony and Cleopatra in the series finale, Brutus walking in among the enemy soldiers in a suicide-by-making-them-kill-me fashion in mid-season two, followed by Servilia and her slave in the next episode.
• While House is a self-destructive bastard with a death wish, the only time he's ever properly tried this is in "Merry Little Christmas", when the Tritter deal got too much for him to handle and he ended up overdosing on a dead patient's meds.
  • He also once electrocuted himself specifically in order to undergo a near-death experience.
  • Then, in "Simple Explanation," Dr. Kutner kills himself. And nobody has any idea why. In Real Life, however, everybody knows why. Kal Penn got a job with the Obama Administration, and you can't be a TV regular and work for the White House at the same time.
  • It's been strongly hinted throughout the series that Taub tried to kill himself in medical school because of the pressure.
  • In the season five episode 'Painless', the patient of the week attempted to kill himself due to a severe pain problem
• Star Trek The Next Generation (and probably the others too) dealt with suicide in every way you could possibly imagine:
  • Klingons were known to engage in ritual suicide if disability forced them to be a burden on their families (family members were the ones to assist in the suicide. In one instance, Worf requested that Riker aid him in his own ritual death - Riker pointedly refused).
    • Specifically, Klingons can't kill themselves as it's dishonorable, so asking a family member to do it is a way round this. In a Deep Space Nine episode Worf's brother Kurn asked him to perform this duty after his family had been stripped of their titles and honor by Chancellor Gowron. When Worf doesn't go through it, and various efforts by Kurn to die in the line of duty fail, Worf comes across his brother drunk with a disrupter in his hand, trying to work up the courage to shoot himself in the head, which would mean eternity in Klingon hell, "but at least I would be with other Klingons."
  • One planet had every member of its society committing suicide when they reached the age of sixty.
  • Suicide as a result of Psychological Interference was the subject of one episode (where empathic impressions from a past suicide caused several empathic individuals in the Enterprise crew to experience hallucinations forcing them to attempt the same thing (some of them succeeded, others didn't).
  • One episode ("Tin Man") had a lonely spacefaring creature trying to kill itself by sticking around a star about to go nova.
    • Only to be subverted by finding companionship from a telepath, so that Tin Man would no longer be alone and the telepath only heard Tin Man's singular voice.
  • In one episode, even Data mentioned that during his early formative phases, he found the process of becoming sentient so difficult that he considered deactivating himself, an act other crew members equated to suicide.
  • In the Deep Space Nine episode "Hard Time", O'Brien gets implanted memories of spending a 20 year prison sentence as part of punishment for a crime. In these fake memories he killed his cell mate over some food (that the cell mate was going to share with O'Brien anyway). O'Brien has such a hard time dealing with his actions, even though they weren't real, that he nearly commits suicide and Bashir has to talk him out of it.
    • Dr. Julian Bashir: The Argrathi did everything they could to strip you of your humanity. And in the end, for one brief moment, they succeeded. But you can't let that brief moment define your entire life. If you do, if you pull that trigger, then the Argrathi will have won - they will have destroyed a good man. You cannot let that happen, my friend.
  • Also on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Weyoun (his 6th clone, anyway) is Driven To Suicide. See also Tear Jerker.
• On Gossip Girl, Serena van der Woodsen returns home from a year at boarding school because of her brother's attempt at suicide.
  • More recently than this, Chuck Bass had to be talked down from the edge by Blair, following the sudden death of his father.
• The Stargate Verse has a few examples:
  • The SG-1 episode "The Light" deals with a Goa'uld discovery that's described as being similar to an opium den. Upon discovering it, the people who witnessed the titular light go into "withdrawal" when they return home, and attempt suicide. (A one-off character kills himself with the kawoosh and Daniel unsuccessfully tries to jump off his balcony.) The situation was resolved, though.
  • An episode of Stargate Atlantis had a society where people were required to commit suicide at the age of twenty-four; this turned out to be a form of population control designed by the Ancients to keep the population contained within the field of the protective shield that hid them from the Wraith.
    • A later episode actually had Sheppard drive another man to suicide, specifically "suicide by being fed on by starving Wraith", since he was responsible for McKay's sister being infected with deadly nanites. The Wraith was the only one competent enough to deactivate them in time, but was too malnourished to do the job.
  • In Stargate Universe, Spencer is driven to suicide through the combination of withdrawal from sleeping pills and the stress of being stranded on Destiny.
• On Fringe, a man that Walter describes as a "reverse-empath" can project his self-loathing and suicidal thoughts onto other people, making them commit suicide. It may be a Take That to The Happening.
• In a Christmas episode of The Jack Benny Show, Jack drives a department store clerk (Mel Blanc!) to shoot himself offscreen through endless pestering demands to repackage a gift. Jack's reaction to this is quite the Crosses The Line Twice moment for '50s television.
• Many people throughout the Law And Order franchise (especially Law And Order Special Victims Unit), but notably in the Law And Order episode that introduces Det. Lupo: His brother is one of a number of people who were helped to commit suicide, and he's looking for their "helper". That person's father, a Dr. Kavorkian expy, takes responsibility before dying of his own poison.
• In Veronica Mars, "Clash of the Tritons", Logan's mother having taken all she can from her cheating husband, abandons her car on a bridge and jumps to her death - apparently. Logan refuses to believe it, and they Never Found The Body.
  • A season and a half later, the Big Bad Cassidy Casablancas leaps to his death after having his crimes and Freudian Excuse (sexual abuse which he was trying desperately to keep secret) made public.
  • Also Logan in the season 1 finale, but unlike the previous 2 examples, he wasn't able to go through with it.
• Frank tries to hang himself more than once in the Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode "The Great Recession."
• In The Tudors, the series version of Cardinal Wolsey perfectly illustrates that trope. Historically, he's said to have died of illness and exhaustion while being detained (and that is already quite ugly), but since he was a) stripped of all titles, offices and incomes, b) kicked out of the royal council, c) sent to jail, d) separated from his beloved Joan and their two children (Yeah, children. So what ? Priests must not marry. That's all), and e) waiting to be trialed for treason, the issue of said trial quite painfully obvious, the suicide option seems sadly logical. Maybe this is a case of Truth In Television, we'll never know.
• On Dead Like Me, the main characters take and guide the souls of people dying from "external influences", including suicides. One notable subversion, however, comes when Daisy's target seems to be on the verge of suicide: Unfunny, unattractive and leaving a speed-dating session with no names, he is standing on a roofs' ledge and looking down. As Daisy approaches him for the Reap, the camera pans down to reveal that he is already dead, with his body lying on the distant pavement. His soul comments that he slipped.
• On Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 819, Invasion of the Neptune Men, a giant nude statue of Bobo is more than Pearl and Observer can take, so much so that they tussle over who gets the noose--until they realize that they have to fix the time-stream to save Chicken in a Biskit.
• In Caprica this was the apparent fate of Amanda Greystone at the first mid-season CliffHanger. That same episode, Zoey Greystone/U-87 also embraced this trope, given that it involved a fiery car crash. Also that same episode, Tamara Adama shot herself, though she knew she wouldn't die from it.
• On Wiseguy, crime boss Sonny Steelgrave chooses this over the imminent humiliation of arrest, prosecution, and lethal injection. His nervy exit-scene actually rates as an Expiring Moment of Awesome.
• In The 4400 Isabelle tries to kill herself by jumping off the 4400 Center (a very, very tall building) because her rapid aging is killing her mother. Unfortunately, she discovers that she's practically immortal, so this doesn't work. Lily then talks her out of trying again.
  • In a subversion, a few episodes later, a man discovers Isabelle floating face-down in a lake. After he saves her, she tells Shawn that she wasn't trying to kill herself. She just wanted to learn to swim!
• In Degrassi High Claude Tanner commits suicide because Caitlin doesn't love him. This lead to either episodes 25 and 26 (Showtime part 1 and 2) or just episode 26 being cut.
• The Red Dwarf episode "Back to Reality" featured the Despair Squid, a genetically-engineered predator which used hallucinogenic ink to induce suicidal depression in its victims, including fish. Even the entirely electronic Rimmer and Kryten were affected.
• In The Sarah Connor Chronicles John, Derrek, Riley, and Cameron all appear to contemplate or attempt suicide.
• On ER, Gant's death is seen as this, though it's never established for certain whether he accidentally fell or deliberately jumped onto the tracks, but Carter seems to feel that the latter is the case, as Gant was depressed and being subjected to relentless criticism from his superior.
• Oliver Queen of Smallville. He gets better, sort of....
• Horatio Hornblower has Archie Kennedy, who after a couple of years in a Spanish prison, five failed escape attempts, and a month in an oubliette, is pushed over the brink by Horatio's arrival (likely because it brought back memories of his old tormentor Simpson, who he didn't know was dead -- after all, immediately after Horatio's arrival Archie started having seizures again, which had only happened around Simpson before). He tries to starve himself to death and Horatio notices just in time to save him.
• In the CSI episode Unleashed, a pregnant teenage high school student named Maria Diorio (played by Brooke Anne Smith) committed suicide by hanging herself with her lover's belt after various traumatic factors, such as her father's death, her pregnancy, her lover's refusal to help her at her time of need, and especially the fact that an Alpha Bitch and her friends, out of resentment that her lover, the homecoming king, dumped her for Maria, decided to get back at her by making obscene posts enmasse, create a website where they planted Maria's face onto a Donkey with a caption stating "I'm a stupid bitch!", as well as a viral video that allegedly had her saying in cheerleading cheers that she was a whore, getting over 1,000,000 hits.
• Played For Laughs during the Pirate episode of Married With Children, where several ship crew members do this for having to endure the (supposedly long) singing from the dreadful pirate, Ruvio the Cruel. Apparently ship wayfarers consider musical-version performances to be torture...
• Even Sesame Street had this in an animated short called "King Minus". If he touches anything at all, it is immediately annihilated. This includes the Damsel In Distress he meant to save. He can't live with himself after that.
• On Kamen Rider Blade, Hajime is forced to become his Joker self and begin The End Of The World As We Know It. After trying several times to resist it, he ultimately finds that it's impossible, so he tries to kill himself with his own weapon to stop it. It fails, because as an Undead, he's immortal. Later, he attempts to force Kenzaki to seal him, an act which could be considered similar to suicide, but Kenzaki finds another way. Both of these also count as attempting]] Hero<u>Heroic Sacrifice</u>, as he was trying to save the world in the process.
• Black Mirror has an odd one. After kidnapping a member of the royal family, getting the UK in an uproar and blackmailing the Prime Minister to have sex with a pig on live TV he decides to kill himself. Seems it was all just a big stunt and presumably he killed himself to avoid capture although he might have got away with it...his suicide and motive is never properly explained.
• In Sherlock, this was Moriarty's plan for Sherlock.
• In Glee, Karofsky tries to kill himself after being outed at his new school, then viciously bullied there and on Facebook.
• In Justified, Mags Bennett poisons herself at the end of Season 2 because two of her three sons are dead, and she hates her only remaining son.
• On an episode of Emergency! Gage and DeSoto are are called by a woman whose roommate has taken a bottle of barbiturates. When they arrives, the woman is conscious, and refuses treatment. The roommates begs them to do something, but they tell her as long as the woman is conscious and refusing treatment, they can't intervene. Once she passes out, they can try to revive her, but by then, it may be too late. While the woman is still conscious, she explains to them why she's been driven to suicide by all the horrible things in her life, none of which are very bad, just to make the point to the audience that suicide is a bad choice. Gage and DeSoto had their equipment ready, in the woman's room, watching her become less and less alert until she passes out on her bed. Then they give her oxygen and drugs to counter-act the barbiturates, and rush her to the hospital, but she dies anyway. There's a not-so-subtle PSA regarding the right of a conscious person to refuse treatment. It was a concern a lot of people had with the new profession of paramedic. There was also a sub-textual PSA that went something like "Don't say 'No' to a paramedic!"
  • Elsa tries to overdose on pills after she miscarries and Hector divorces her.
• Tommy from The Shield shoots himself after having his ex-wife and son murdered and losing his job.

Music Edit

• "Fade to Black" by Metallica, one of the earliest Heavy Metal examples.
• The Police song "Can't Stand Losing You".
• "The Last Night" by Skillet was written about a person who John talked out of this trope.
• "End of My Rope" by Biohazard nails the psychology behind this trope pretty well, which lines such as "The pain inside surrounds me", "I find myself alone and scared / in a world where nobody cares" and "The tears I've cried have left me blind".
• The subject of the song "Inside the Fire" by Disturbed. Based on a true story in the lead singer's life.
• Close to half of defunct Finnish metal band Sentenced's studio output dealt with the subject. Then again, with songs like "Excuse Me While I Kill Myself", "Consider Us Dead" and "End of the Road", it's kind of their thing.
• The 17-year-old runaway girl protagonist of Marillion's Concept AlbumBrave endures alienation, abuse, betrayal, addiction and rape and ends up killing herself.
  • • In the film version, she does. On the album, it's quite ambiguous.
• Nerd Core artist MC Lars wrote a song called "Twenty-Three" about a real life friend named Patrick Wood who drove himself to suicide.
• Kate Bush has two:
  • "The Kick Inside" - A brother and sister BrotherSisterIncest have sex, which results in pregnancy. Not wanting to bring shame to her family, the girl kills herself & her unborn baby.
  • "The Wedding List" - A couple is about to get married until some guy shoots the groom. The bride-to-be hunts the killer down, then kills herself. She was unknowingly pregnant, which means that four people were killed.
• Inverted in the song "Spring" by Rammstein. A man goes on a bridge to admire the view, but a crowd forms, thinking he's gonna jump. In the end, the man gets pushed off by an impatient bystander hungry for blood.
• In Havalina's "Bullfighter", after the matador of the title is beaten and humiliated in the ring, "He couldn't take another day, he went up to the highest roof and flew away."
• The Third Eye Blind song Jumper is about the singer trying to convince his friend not to go through with the latter's attempted suicide. It was also featured in the film Yes Man.
• The Rasmus' song No Fear tells about a suicide of an unnamed girl: "Girl, your final journey has just begun, your destiny chose the reaper." and "Girl, close your eyes for the one last time, sleepless night from here to eternity" are just a few bits from the lyrics.
• AFI's Miss Murder tells a story of celebrity who committed suicide after his downfall. Sample lyrics:
  • The stars that pierce the sky
  • he left them all behind.
  • We're left to wonder why
  • he left us all behind.
  • Hey Miss Murder, can I (2x)
  • make beauty stay if I take my life?
• "Perfect Kiss" by NewOrder is about watching a deranged friend take his life. "Told me not to see his gun... The perfect kiss is the kiss of death". Possibly based on the real-life suicide of JoyDivision Ian Curtis.
• "Another Day" by Ray Wilson is about the suicide of one of Ray's school friends:
  • I don't like this place at all
  • Makes me wonder what I'm here for
  • Someone take this pain away
  • Dying to see another day
  • And I don't want to be your friend
  • Or pretend I can fit into
  • I'm incensed, I'm blown away
  • Dying to see another day
• Kix's Don't close your eyes features a person who angsts about a troubled friend's possible suicide.
  • Hold on hold on tight
  • I’ll make everything all right
  • Wake up, don’t go asleep
  • I’ll pray the Lord, your soul to keep
  • Don’t close your eyes
  • Don’t close your eyes
  • Don’t sing your last lullaby
• Rise Above This by Seether is about a teenaged boy committing suicide and how it affected his family.
• "Torn" by Seabound is told from the point of view of someone who has just slit their wrists, secretly hoping to be saved at the last second by the person he loves/is obsessed with. Sadly, as lyricist Frank Spinath makes clear on the band's website:
  • SHE will not burst through the door.
  • SHE will not call.
  • SHE is not thinking of you right now.
  • SHE won't even move.
  • SHE NEVER DID.
• Voltaire's Underground, about a man who kills himself by jumping after being viciously rejected, and apparently jeered at, at a cafe'.
  • Six feet of earth
  • Above my head
  • keeps me safe
  • from what she said
  • Six walls of wood
  • to keep them out
  • the smart remarks,
  • the screams, the shouts
  • They scream, they shout
  • There's only one way
  • to drown them out
  • I hear your voice
  • I hit the ground
• The Insane Clown Posse song "Suicide Hotline" has Shaggy as a hotline operator trying to talk down a suicidal Violent J, who has a long list of reasons why he wants to die. The song ends with J getting a call on the other line from a woman, who makes comments implying she wants to have sex with him and gives him a reason to live for at least a few more hours.
• Biggie's "Suicidal Thoughts"
• Nas's "Undying Love" has Nas playing a man who comes home from Las Vegas to find his wife cheating with another man, and concocts violent revenge on the pair with a friend. Things take a downhill turn as the two burst into the house, and Nas's character shoots his wife dead by accident. As the police surround the house, he falls into despair, and shoots himself dead.
• Apparently an Author Appeal subject for Cheap Trick, as it's not uncommon in their lyrics. Full-song examples include the peppy, cheerful "Auf Weidersehen", and the darker "Can't Go On". There's also "Oh Candy", which is a tribute to a friend of the band who had committed suicide.
• Emilie Autumn has written a lot of songs about this. (The Art Of Suicide, Shalott, Opheliac, 306, Dead Is the New alive)
• David Bowie's "Jump They Say" is about a man who is...different from others mentally, and the victim of a world that refuses to help him, even encouraging his demise. The music video makes the story more specific -- Bowie plays the protagonist as a businessman who is taken captive by his suspicious peers and given electroshock therapy; if they intend it as a cure, it doesn't work (or even backfires) as he jumps from the top of the office building to his death afterward. Sad to say, this 1993 song has a Reality Subtext -- it's inspired by the 1985 suicide of Bowie's schizophrenic half-brother Terry.
• The video for Roxette's Anyone features a character who decides to leave her hotel room, walks along streets to the beach, and decides to drown herself. She is later rescued by the medic.
• The Replacements song "The Ledge" is about a man who kills himself by jumping. The song never explicitly states his reason(s) for killing himself, but it implies that he feels ignored by everybody including " a girl that I knew once years ago".
• Steely Dan's "Don't Take Me Alive" is about a small-time crook who is Driven to Suicide By Cop (by creating a hostage situation/bomb threat in a bank, apparently) when he "crossed his old man back in Oregon".
• "Blue Sunny Day" by Jonathan Coulton is about a vampire who kills himself by standing outside and watching the sun rise. Although you'd never know it if you're not paying attention to the lyrics.
• Radiohead, being Radiohead, have quite a few songs of this nature, ranging from subtle to unmistakably blatant. The most obvious example would probably be "No Surprises".
• Florence And The Machine have "Hurricane Drunk" and "What The Water Gave Me"
• Evanescence have "Tourniquet"
• The video for Bruno Mars' Grenade starts with a guy who takes trouble dragging a piano to his girlfriend's house to perform a song for her, only to find out she's been cheating on him. So the guy decides to take his piano and perform elsewhere... the railroads.
• St. Jimmy died today//He blew his brains out into the bay...
• At the climax of Quadrophenia by TheWho, the protagonist is on a rock in the ocean, debating whether to jump.
• In Calexico's "Not Even Stevie Nicks...", the protagonist has "a head like a vulture / and a heart full of hornets", so "he drives off a cliff / into the blue, into the blue."
• Julia Nunes sings about a girl in "Stairwell" who seems to be dead (Note: "There's a body in this stairwell, call the cops I think she's dead") and admits in the end: {{spoiler|"perhaps I didn't trip [...] standing at the top [...] It's been so hard to just keep living so I thought it might be worth it"]]
• Blue Man Group's "The Current", if taken a certain way, sounds like the singer is trying to commit suicide by electrocution, only to be defibrillated and live.

Mythology Edit

• Psyche has a track record of this trope: twice after she loses Cupid, and once after each of the last three impossible tasks the bitch Venus orders. Considering the raw deals she has got, it is hard to blame her.

Newspaper Comics Edit

• Beetle Bailey
  • Subverted[=/=]parodied: "Killer" Diller has threatened to kill himself after being told off by his girlfriend. The others find him "doing it slowly" -- smoking two cigarettes at a time.
  • Left hanging another time, in one variation of a reused gag where Beetle overhears the guys planning to pull a prank on him by calling in pretending to be Sarge. Then the real Sarge calls in and buys it when Beetle pretends to be the General and tells him to do something absurd. In this one instance, Beetle says he's disappointed in him and he can just go tie a rock around his neck and jump into water. The last panel shows Sarge about to do so. It's PlayedForLaughs and forgotten immediately afterwards; presumably he didn't do it.

Radio Drama Edit

• There's a sort of joking, Continuity Nod version in the Doctor Who Big Finish story Caerdroia. The Doctor, dealing with an Obstructive Bureaucrat, says that he's going to go take a couple of aspirin. It was once stated that aspirin is poison to Time Lords. Without knowing that, it sounds as though he's merely, and quite reasonably, complaining of a headache, as he's just been asked to refer his question of whether anyone in the building can help him to the Rhetorical or Genuine Questions Office, but it's actually more akin to an exasperated finger-gun-to-the-head gesture.

Real Life Edit

For Troper Tales, use Troper Tales/Driven To Suicide.

Tabletop Games Edit

• In the origin story for the Ravenloft setting, grieving bride Tatyana throws herself from the clifftop castle wall, rather than be turned into a vampire by her fiance's murderous brother, Strahd von Zarovich.
• One of the Deathlords in Exalted, during his first life as a Solar Exalted, was inducted into a Circle (adventuring party) to replace their lost member, who had carried the same Shard. After enduring a decade of them demonstrating why the Solars ended up being overthrown, he killed himself. Then, after spending a fair while as a brooding ghost, the rest of them managed what he saw as a Karma Houdini...so now he wants to destroy all life.

Theater Edit

• Very prominent in Greek tragedy.
  • In the ancient Greek play Antigone, Creon, the king of Thebes sentences Antigone to be buried alive in a cave for breaking his orders. Rather than starve to death, she hangs herself. When her fiancé, Creon's son learns that, he kills himself. When his mother, Creon's wife hears that, she kills herself. When Creon learns all that, he doesn't kill himself - he just becames very miserable.
  • Jocasta in Oedipus Rex, after she finds out her husband is her son.
  • In Hippolytus, Phaedra commits suicide after the goddess Aphrodite causes her to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytus.
  • Io in Prometheus Bound, hearing her future wanderings, says she might as well.
  • Io: What boots my life, then? why not cast myself
  • Down headlong from this miserable rock,
  • That, dashed against the flats, I may redeem
  • My soul from sorrow? Better once to die
  • Than day by day to suffer.
• Ajax, after his madness dissipates, is in such a state of dishonour that he cannot allow himself to try and reconcile with the Greeks in Ajax, in spite of the pleas of his family and friends. He tricks them into thinking is is fine but then goes off to commit suicide on Hektor's sword.
  • Deianira of Theatre/TheTrachiniae kills herself with a sword on her marriage bed after she realizes her agency in fatally wounding her husband, Herakles.
• In Hamlet, the famous "To be, or not to be" line is from a soliloquy of the title character after he found that his uncle Claudius had killed his father Hamlet Sr. and had married his mother Gertrude, and comparing the shock to that of someone contemplating suicide. One interpretation is that Ophelia's death really is a suicide.
  • Third example from Hamlet is Horatio, who attempts to die with Hamlet by drinking the remainder of the poisoned wine that killed Gertrude. Hamlet has to wrestle the chalice away from him and talk him into living. It's not the most inspiring speech, but it works.
  • Also from Shakespeare, in King Lear, after Gloucester is blinded, he asks someone to take him to a cliff so he can jump off. The disguised Edgar takes him up on it, but tricks him into thinking he's at a cliff when really he's on a flat plain. It can be hard to direct; after all, if not pulled off correctly, the scene can just fall flat on its face.
  • Romeo And Juliet both kill themselves at the end, Romeo because he wanted to join Juliet in death (but tragically, he didn't know that Juliet was only FakingTheDead because the information that Friar Lawrence had intended for him never arrived), and Juliet because she wanted to join Romeo in death.
    • Some productions make Tybalt's death more or less a suicide too- his slaying of Mercutio is sometimes played as unintentional, and Tybalt is shocked enough by what he's done that he lets Romeo kill him.
  • Most of Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes and villains qualify for this trope. Macbeth was one of the exceptions, as his death was in battle against Macduff rather than by his own hand. LadyMacbeth His wife, however...
• Four words: Death Of A Salesman.
• Happens a lot in opera too:
  • Floria Tosca of the opera Tosca throws herself off a tower after a harrowing BreakTheCutie ordeal that ends with her being forced to accept the original ScarpiaUltimatum to keep her lover Mario Cavaradossi from being executed, killing Scarpia before he can rape her, and then finding out that he had ordered Mario's real execution instead of the false one he had promised her if she agreed to it.
  • Madame Butterfly, in its tragic TearJerker tearjerking finale, has poor Cio-Cio-San committing seppuku with the dagger given to her by the Mikado after learning that her lover Pinkerton is not coming for her like he promised her he would and that he has married another.
    • And the Broadway interpretation MissSaigon does something similar, when the protagonist shoots herself both in despair over the loss of Chris and to force him to take their son Tam back to America with him.
  • Katerina in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, having painted herself into a FailureIsTheOnlyOption corner, jumps into a frozen lake. Britten's Peter Grimes is similar.
  • Subverted in Alban Berg's Lulu. Dr Schön forces Lulu to kill herself after he finds out about her affair. She kills him instead.
  • Magda Sorel in The Consul, having failed after many visits to get the Secretary to give her something besides paperwork, gasses herself to death at home.
• The Childrens Hour': Martha actually does commit suicide after the rumor of her being a lesbian becomes too much.
• HenrikIbsen loved this trope. He wrote suicidal characters in A Dolls House, Ghosts (assisted suicide), The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and HeddaGabler. Not all of them go through with it, but for those five plays, the final tally is: 4 suicides in the text, 1 in the backstory, and possibly 2 others, depending on your character interpretation. As great a writer as he was, Ibsen really could have used a hug.
• Mariane in Moliere's Tartuffe declares that she'll kill herself - with a pair of sewing scissors, no less - since her father is making her marry the eponymous JerkAss. Her maid intervenes.
• Christine and then Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra.
• Moritz Stiefel in Spring Awakening. He's a decent, hard-working kid trying to deal with schoolwork and his parents making him feel like a total pariah at home when he doesn't get top marks, plus guilt and shame over his changing body and sexual urges. He seems to get a break when he finds out he passed the midterms. Whereupon they fail him anyway because the school can't pass everyone. He then appeals to his best friend's mother, who apparently doesn't give a poo about his angst and ignores his cry for help, and his parents - well. After that, a (female) childhood friend offers him comfort, but he's so conflicted, he refuses and she storms off, very hurt. And then the poor boy puts a pistol in his mouth. And most of the audience walk away with broken hearts.
• S.P. Miskowski's my new friends (are so much better than you) is based on the forementioned RealLife tragedy of Megan Meier, who hanged herself after being bullied by a friend's mother masquerading as a teenage boy named Josh Evans on MySpace.
• In Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother a woman nonchalantly tells her mother she's planning to commit suicide that night, leading to a long dialogue in which Mama tries to talk her out of it. Mama is unsuccessful.
• Cyrano De Bergerac:
  • Invoked by Roxane, when Cyrano questions her what would she do if that guy Christian is not eloquent:
    • Cyrano: All words are fair that lurk 'neath fair mustache!
    • — Suppose he were a fool!. . .
    • Roxane: (stamping her foot): Then bury me!
  • Subverted by Raguenau when he discovers himself alone and ruined between acts II and III: he intents it, but is saved by Cyrano.
    • Ragueneau: — And then, off she went, with a musketeer! Deserted and ruined too, I would make an end of all, and so hanged myself. My last breath was drawn: — then in comes Monsieur de Bergerac! He cuts me down, and begs his cousin to take me for her steward.
• Ajax in The Golden Apple jumps out a window after squandering his friends' money by unwisely investing it in hemp.
• Jason in bare: a pop opera. He's feeling so much angst about being gay, he got Ivy pregnant, his friends have left him and when he asks Peter to run away with him, Peter refuses and says he can't hide anymore. The audience is left drowning in their own tears.

Theme Parks Edit

• The Haunted Mansion ride at Disney Theme Parks: the Ghost Host is a man who hung himself, as he reveals in the streaching room. He is generally thought to be Master Gracy, though the two are officialy seperate characters. This idea was eventually used in the first movie.
  • The French version, Phantom Manor, has this man murdered by demonic lord of the house. But, it has a Shoot The Shaggy Dog ending; where a bride-in waiting, tormented by the Phantom to the point of losing her youth/beauty/happiness, finally just gives in and accepts death.
• A rumor was that an employee who worked for Disney committed suicide because he could not listen to It's a Small World all day. In reality an employee did committ suicide in the park but their body was not near any of the rides.

Video Games Edit

• God Of War starts with Kratos throwing himself off a cliff, with the game being a How We Got Here. The Gods decide that You Kill It You Bought It and therefore promote him as the new God of War. This turns out badly for them when they renege on this decision.
• In The World Ends With You, Joshua, supposedly. He's likely to be lying, but if it was suicide it didn't occur recently.
• In the Visual Novel Heart De Roommate, the gang attempt to befriend a rather lonely schoolgirl with a past history of attempted suicide. This leads to one of the darkest scenes in the game, when during a conversation with the main character on the roof she accuses him of only being interested because he fancies her and offers to have sex with him if he'll leave her alone. When he refuses she proceeds to make another offer... sleep with her or she'll scream that he's a rapist and jump off the roof, something that seems quite plausible given her past history and self destructive personality. She doesn't go through with it no matter what the player chooses, though accepting her offer leads to a rather bleak Nonstandard Game Over.
• Drakengard has two examples. The first one is Leonard, who comes home to see his family dead and his home razed by the evil Empire. Feeling that he has failed to protect them, he gets very close to cutting his own throat, only being stopped by a malicious fairy. The second is the protagonist's sister, who, due to Mind Rape, commits suicide to escape disgrace.
• One of the bad endings in School Days has this too: Kotonoha Katsura, the Ojou of the story, throws herself off a building if Makoto (in the main player's shoes) goes with Sekai instead. And she actually dies in front of Sekai and Makoto', traumatizing them so badly that Makoto not only breaks up with Sekai, but swears off romance forever.
• In the end of Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 (and Advance too), being the 'only survivor' of the Shadow Mirror, Lamia Loveless thought that she has failed her mission, killed her teammates and superiors, and is a defective product all around, and thus she attempts to self destruct... only to be stopped by her new teammates just in time and be persuaded to live her life in the current world. She actually has more self-destruct attempts throughout the series, but only this occasion fits the trope.
• Starcraft: Gerard DuGalle commits suicide after his defeat, in remorse over his gullibility and murder of Alexei Stukov.
• If Joshua has failed to save both of his Unlucky Childhood Friends in Vandal Hearts 2, he will arrive at the parapets of his third Unlucky Childhood Friend and love Adele's castle just in time for her to say she's had enough of being used and leap off.
• Yume Nikki: After dropping the 24 effects off in the Nexus, Madotsuki wakes up from her dream, walks out onto the balcony... and leaps off the edge. Cut to black and a bloody red smear on the canvas.
• You can talk the Big Bad Load Bearing Boss of Fallout 1 into activating the Self Destruct Mechanism of his Supervillain Lair, thus committing suicide, by bringing evidence that as Super Mutants are infertile, his plan to have them be the wasteland's dominant species will fail.
  • You can talk the Big Bad Load Bearing Boss of Fallout 3 into activating the Self Destruct Mechanism of his Supervillain Lair, thus committing suicide.
  • In Fallout New Vegas, if you tell Ranger Chief Hanlon that you know he's the one behind the bizarre intelligence reports to get the Rangers out of what he considers a Hopeless War, he'll excuse himself, announce his misdeeds to Camp Golf, and shoot himself in the head.
    • Also in Fallout: New Vegas, when the security came on-line at the Sierra Madre Casino, some of the guests killed themselves to avoid dying of starvation or being killed by security. Vera Keyes, the singer for whom the casino was built, killed herself due to a severe, long-term pain problem and related drug addiction.
• In Metal Gear Solid 2, it is revealed that {{spoiler|Otacon's father drowned himself after finding out that his wife (Otacon's step-mother) and son were having an affair.]] In the same game, Fortune's mother committed suicide after her husband's death and her son-in-law's imprisonment.
  • MGS4, Vamp and Naomi go out this way after disabling the nanomachines keeping them alive.
• In one of Silent Hill 2's Multiple Endings, James drowns himself so that he can be Together In Death with his wife, Mary.
• Setsumi from Narcissu. Probably justified that since she had terminal disease, she's going to die anyway, and she doesn't want to die at home or in the hospital.
• Archer, AKA Emiya Shirou of Fate Stay Night, except as a spirit existing primarily outside of time he's actually incapable of death, so his suicide plan is killing Shirou so that he can't make the contract with the world and become Archer, hopefully canceling himself out of existence. Several characters point out, including himself, that this is very unlikely to work.
• Kohaku in Tsukihime in Hisui's route. The True End she succeeds. The Good End Shiki saves her at the cost of some of his lifespan. Either way, she points out that she has nothing left to live for anymore and did not really want to do what she did.
• In Myst III: Exile, if you make the crueler choice at the end, it is implied Saavedro kills himself.
• Semolina from Magical Starsign allows herself to be eaten by a heterotrophous plant. It's partly Heroic Sacrifice, but mostly this. If Semolina didn't, Sorbet WOULD have. Yeah...
• Intentionally done to the local priest, Minase, in Suika. And he deserves it too. First, he strangled his insane wife to death, which... might be overlookable. She was nuts. But then he comes across his daughter, kills her with a shovel and buries the two together. He puts his other daughter, unconscious and badly bleeding in the hospital and doesn't even recognize which of his daughters she is. When Akira finds all this out, he confronts him and recommends suicide.
• In the The Thing video game, if your teammates get scared enough, they will pull out a pistol and shoot themselves in the head.
• This happens if you scare the teddy bears enough in Naughty Bear.
• Late in Valkyria Chronicles II, when the Rebels actually succeed in completely taking over Gallia, the sheer hopelessness of the situation causes Lanseal's headmaster to have a mental breakdown that ultimately culminates in him shooting himself in the mouth.
• Shadow Warrior has a humorous version: the standard mooks that shoot Uzis at the player character seem to have a high enough sense of honour that they'll take their failure to kill him in the only way a honourable warrior would: by eating their gun and shooting half their skull off.
• Mamiya Shinzo commits suicide out of guilt and possibly as atonement in several endings of Kara No Shoujo, possibly after {{spoiler|killing his son Shinji, who is the second serial killer.]]
• In Hatoful Boyfriend it is revealed that Nageki killed himself five years ago.
• In Katawa Shoujo, it's all but stated that Rin Tezuka might end up doing this, since in her route she becomes more and more self-destructive in her despair to get enough inspiration to create art, which does not mix well with how she cannot exprress herself unless it's through art itself. Also, that same route says that the husband of her sponsor, Sae Saionji, was a talented artist who also commited suicide, for exactly the same reason.
  • Something that's kinda overlooked by fans during early playthroughs is that Shiina Mikado aka Misha also has suicidal tendencies. In Shizune's route, during a talk with Hisao, she tells him "Wouldn't it be better if I disappeared...?"

Webcomics Edit

• This is the usual response someone gets when they've read My Immortal.
• Lexx from Alien Dice tried to kill himself several times but survived because of tiny machines injected into his circulation. He doesn't dare to try the most radical methods for fear of the pain if the machines would still repair his body. Only after several attempts to die failed did he gather the determination to try and win.
• Justin from El Goonish Shive seriously contemplated suicide a few years ago (in comic time). Big Bad Damien actually committed suicide upon realizing he was not a god.
• Luna Travoria from Dominic Deegan tried to kill herself twice in the same story arc. The first attempt ended with {{spoiler|Luna and Dominic uncovering a plot from her crazy mother, in which she would make a great deal of money by Luna driven to suicide. The old lady would wind up dead anyway, after picking a fight with a Royal Knight and getting her head chopped off.]] The second time, Luna jumped off a bridge after said crazy mother left her nothing in her will, and her half-dead body was discovered by Dominic and his cat Spark while on a fishing trip.
  • Nimmel Feenix later tries the jumping-off-a-bridge strategy for himself after a rather horrific attack on his class by a Psycho For Hire. He's stopped by none other than Luna herself.
• Two characters from Yu Me Dream feel Driven To Suicide.
• One of the Paladins in The Order Of The Stick commits seppuku after a slaughter in the throneroom
• Questionable Content has Faye, a girl with obvious issues. It is later revealed that the reason she is so severely messed up is that her father, who she saw as her best friend and in whom she confided everything, committed suicide for reasons unknown by blowing his brains out with a gun,in front of her. He went outside in the early morning without realizing that she had gotten out of bed and followed him outside. Then he blew his brains out before she could call out to him. Yikes.
  • It's also implied that the car accident she was in just before the story started was an attempt. Faye says that she isn't sure herself, because she doesn't remember the moments leading up to the crash.
• Scotty kills himself in Something Positive.
• Breakfast of the Gods: {{spoiler|Trix]] tries to hang himself after {{spoiler|betraying Cap'n Crunch into a fatal ambush]]. He doesn't succeed, because the tree cuts him off and says {{spoiler|BlackComedy "Silly rabbit."]]
• Artie Crowley of Concession was seen holding a gun to his head after realising he had had sex with a prepubescent boy while in a trance and unable to realise what he was doing, but he didn't go through with it.
• This is the entire basis for every storyline in Suicide For Hire, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
• After untolds amounts of emotional suffering due to his robotic form, the title character of Warbot In Accounting finally decides to kill himself by jumping off his office building while leaving behind a note scribbled "No Love". It doesn't work due to him being NighInvulnerable and he ends up taking crap from his co-workers for skipping work.
• BLU Sniper in Cuanta Vida, after losing both his lover and his eyes. Because he was blinded, though, Medic had to help him.
  • {{spoiler|Or so the BLU Medic claims; subsequent events suggest another possibility.]]
• Otter Soldiers: Subverted. One of the characters at one point contemplates upon committing suicide. She ends up thinking too much about how it could end up going horribly wrong (survived but crippled etc.), and is ultimately unable to go through with it.
• Neilli of Juathuur is driven to suicide {{spoiler|by Meidar, who decides that a girl that wants to be a healer would make a perfect torturer. Possibly a SecretTestOfCharacter directed at Neilli's boyfriend Thomil.]]
• Daichi Takana's mother is apparently driven to suicide by a Mafia boss, who just so happens to be his friend's father in [The Mitadake Saga]
• Conor from Freak Angels shoots himself in the head, not out of a true desire to die, but out of a wish to upgrade his mental abilities. His action fits this trope because he really didn't know whether he'd survive, and his conversation with Arkady and relationship with the other Freak Angels suggest that he didn't much care.
• At the end of Anders Loves Maria, Tina commits suicide after failing to win Anders back.
• Wapsi Square BackStory: Jin tried to derail the spell with this. It didn't work
• Webcomic/Bug sees this as an acceptable response when your web server goes down.
• {{spoiler| Lucy does this in "Disaster Dominoes" near the end to TogetherInDeath join the recently run down Mike.]]
• A RunningGag across MSPaintAdventures as a whole is people being driven to suicide near a stump in an empty field, later named the Land of Stumps and Dismay in Webcomic/Homestuck. First it was the protagonist of Jailbreak, then later an audience member of Problem Sleuth and Homestuck gives it some serious consideration in response to events in the comics themselves.
  • However, a few of the characters have attempted suicide: the Ace Dick who played the Game of Life with Death in ProblemSleuth, and the Handmaid in Homestuck. Both cases proved temporary, although the Handmaid eventually succeeded in Suicide By Cop.

Web Original Edit

• In The Gamers Alliance, Marya finally cracks when she becomes guilt-ridden by all the bad things she's done and commits suicide in order to atone for her sins and be reunited with her husband AntiVillain Kagetsu in the afterlife.
• Germaine from Neurotically Yours attempts suicide fairly regularly. In one of earliest episodes, she stands with a gun to her head while Foamy relentlessly mocks her lack of resolution and reasons for putting the gun to her head. It's implied that she ends up shooting Foamy. "Almost Serious Suicide".
• In a later episode, the suicide helpline guy mocks her for using suicide helplines so much.
• A good chunk of Sailor Nothing derives dramatic tension from a "will she or won't she" situation, especially when it's revealed that every Sailor to ever be in Himei's position ended up killing herself.
• Many characters in Survival Of The Fittest choose to commit suicide rather than kill their classmates or allow themselves to be killed. The most memorable of these is probably River Garraty, who was the first one to kill themselves by intentionally running into a danger zone. In v3, there have been six intentional suicides; {{spoiler|Tegan Bianco, Keiji Tanaka, Anna Grout, Bobby Jacks, Gabe McCallum and Quincy Archer]]. Three other characters killed themselves by accident.
  • Recently in v4, Dawne Jiang commits suicide by remaining in a dangerzone after it has been announced as such. {{spoiler|Hermione Miller]] and Violetta Lindsberg also commit suicide by pulling on their collars.
    • Maria Graham attempts suicide by trying to slash her own throat with a shard of broken glass. Fortunately, one of her friends shows up just in time to stop her.
• In the web-novel Fragile, Severin has an irrational fascination with the idea of suicide after going insane and is found at the end attempting to slit his wrists; {{spoiler|or at least, Page thinks he is, but he finds Severin before anything can be done.]] It's never stated exactly why, but it might be because he's attempting to escape the pain of being insane.
• Jerry at the end of Jerry. The rest of the series elaborates on his backstory and shows how the other characters were affected by the event.
• The Nostalgia Critic takes special precautions to prevent himself from committing suicide when reviewing Batman And Robin. Even so, he still sneaks in a cyanide pill and takes it during the review. Someone promptly runs on camera and performs the Heimlich Manuver so he survives.
  • In many other reviews, after a particularly bad scene, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head, and goes back to reviewing three seconds later.
  • Another critic on the site, Film Brain, sometimes places a gun to his head when things are getting to be too much for him. "Why is it always empty?!"
  • The Nostalgia Chick pulls a plastic bag over her head and strangles herself after being subjected to "There Must Be An Angel".
• One of the authors on Newgrounds made a suicide. Irony of that his first submission to Newgrounds was... Fun With Suicide!
• {{spoiler|General Briggs]] in the final chapter of BrokenSaints.
• Toad is driven to suicide at the end of talk my head off because he killed so many people.
• In The Guild, Zaboo tries to hang himself with an ethernet code to escape his overbearing mother (no screenshot, but it happened). This ends up being the killing blow for her. Not that she actually dies, it's just in their fantasy of her as a monster...It Makes Sense In Context.
• Look To The West: Lavoisier offs himself when he learns that the primitive gas chamber he built has been used to execute the French Royal Family.
• The Spy, from Water-Human, chose to throw himself off a cliff rather than let the Water-Human kill him. In fact, he did this mostly because he was so depressed by people dying in suspicious amounts around the Water-Human.
• The Original Spoony One came back from the dead in the VideoGame/FinalFantasyX review. He was ready to kill his clone in order to get his show back. After the clone just gave up the show, Original Spoony realized that he had to review FinalFantasyX. He promptly shot himself in the head and became dead. Again.
• A Magical Girl attempting this by jumping on Live National TV is what starts off the Magical Girl Alliance. But she gets better.
• Almost in Atop The Fourth Wall. Later Linkara gets Missingno to commit suicide.

Western Animation Edit

• In Batman Beyond, Mr. Freeze, having returned to his villainous ways following an attempted return to a normal life, lets himself be killed by an explosion rather than be saved by Batman. He had already been pretty badly injured by Blight, but his choice was more out of despair than any sense of inevitability.
• In the Happy Tree Friends episode "Wishy Washy", Petunia gets covered in dirt and due to her Super OCD, she goes crazy and tries to find a way to clean off the dirt. But all the waterworks in her house were messed up before she lost it. When all the water she gets is dirty she resorts to finding something to scrub of the dirt. The last thing she gets is a potato peeler. She then peels off her own skin. Wow.
• In an episode of American Dad, one of Francine's friends sinks into a deep depression and Roger (disguised as a psychologist) offers this "helpful" advice: "You should totally kill yourself."
• The Simpsons sometimes has the bartender, Moe, attempt suicide, usually to be accidentally saved. Well, at least it used to be sometimes. Frank Grimes, sadly, wasn't so lucky.
  • Although with Frank it wasn't so much "driven to suicide" as "driven stark staring bonkers and unable to recognize that yes, electricity does kill you if you approach it the wrong way".
  • The episode where the Simpsons had 25 puppies subverted this. When it turned out that the Simpsons' dogs were world champions, we see what looks to be Homer hanging himself. Marge is horrified, only for the scene to show he was just batting a lightbulb while hanging by his arm on the rafters.
  • Similarly, in an episode parodying 24, driven to guilt from {{spoiler|acting as Jimbo's inside man]] Martin gets on a stool and is seen hanging when he knocks it over. A pull back of the camera shows he just wedgied himself.
  • Moe's holiday tradition is trying to kill him self.
  • Played disturbingly straight by Bart in "The Boys Of Bummer".
• Dinobot in Transformers: Beast Wars is seen in his quarters, early in the episode "Code Of Hero", overcome by dishonor and holding his sword at his chest before tossing it aside in disgust. Some fans view his Heroic Sacrifice later in the episode as suicide, given the odds stacked against him and the fact that the other Maximals were already on their way. There's no clear answer here.
• Subverted horribly in Aqua Teen Hunger Force due to Snap Back.
  • In "Video Ouiji", Shake killed himself so he could haunt Meatwad through a video game.
  • In "dirtfoot", Shake killed himself so an old woman's top would disappear. At least Frylock was happy...
• In the South Park episode "Night Of The Living Homeless", a man tries "to take the easy way out" by shooting himself. He shoots himself over and over again, destroying his body further, but not dying. This is also an example of Crossing The Line Twice.
  • In another episode, Cartman tries to kill himself after watching the latest "cool" movie, High School Musical.
  • In another episode, Britney Spears blows her head off... and lives. So, the cult which apparently everybody in the country belongs to decides they need to try harder. "It's gonna be a goooood harvest."
  • In ""Die Hippie, Die" Mayor McDaniels shoots herself in the temple when the hippie music festival she authorized turns South Park into the hippie capital of the world.
  • Stan causes this in 'Cash For Gold' where he repeatedly tells the host of the shopping network to kill himself in an epic case of Deadpan Snark.
• Subverted in Family Guy: Neil pretends to be about to jump off of a building, but later he tells Meg that he wasn't going to jump, regardless of whether she tried to stop him.
• The members of Dethklok in Metalocalypse jokingly tell someone to kill himself. He does.
  • Nathan Explosion believes all dentists are suicidal whackjobs. He's right.
  • All Dethklok fans might qualify, since they sign Pain Waivers absolving Dethklok from any responsibility for accidents, injuries and fatalities during their concerts.
    • But dude, Dethklok is f*cking metal.
• In Robot Chicken, when fighting one of the Winged Monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz, TheCrow gives him a depressingly nihilistic monologue that causes the monkey to just hang himself. Cue Crow wiping away a tear.
  • The bloopers show host kills himself at the end of every segment he's in.
• In an episode of Futurama where Fry and Leela get superpowers, and are in the Mayor's office when he's trying to summon their superheroic alter egos. After Leela and Bender make up excuses to leave, Fry just yells, "And I just can't take life anymore!" and leaps out the window.
  • In the pilot, Bender couldn't keep on living after finding out he was building suicide booths, and meets Fry while waiting in line to use one.
• Many Looney Tunes cartoons feature characters offing themselves after seeing something particularly ridiculous. Occasionally, especially in Tex Avery's cartoons, they ended with the main character shooting themselves, such as in Red Hot Riding Hood. These scenes are particularly shocking to modern audiences, and Bowdlerized typically censored these days]] except in uncut releases.
  • In Chuck Jones' "Cheese Chasers", a pair of mice decide to commit suicide-by-cat after having eaten themselves sick on cheese and decide that there's nothing left to live for since they'll never be able to enjoy cheese again. They only succeed in driving the cat to suicide as well.
• Tom and Jerry has a similar joke.
• When Tom lost a triumph over Jerry and ends up shooting himself five times:
  • 1: At the end of The Million Dollar Cat, Tom vows never to chase another mouse again. He sees Jerry on his new home. He then shoots himself in the head, and his ghost begins to do wild takes.
  • 2: The Vanishing Duck: Tom shoots himself in the head after Jerry make him visible.
  • 3: Timid Tabby: Tom scares George move to another house by shooting himself when he has 1 pair of heads and 2 pairs of arms and legs gets catapulted by Jerry.
  • 4: In The Year of the Mouse, Jerry and an unnamed grey mouse escape from a bottle and grab a cheese by making Tom shock to see, causing him commit suicide with a gun.
  • 5: Duel Personality, Tom slaps himself with the glove, tricked by Jerry and commits suicide.
• Tom commits suicide by other characters two times:
  • 1: In "Nit-Witty Kitty", Jerry is frustrated by Tom who believes that he is a mouse and shoots a cat with a gun.
  • 2: In "Southbound Duckling", Tom finds Spike the Bulldog instead of Jerry and Quacker and commits suicide-by-dog.
• In Twice Upon A Time, the Big Bad's lackey Scuzzbopper tries to hang himself after his boss throws out his manuscript for a "great A-Murk-ian novel", but he doesn't quite succeed. Fortunately, the heroes find him, talk him out of it, and HeelFaceTurn enlist his aid in thwarting the bad guys.
• Courage screams so loud that an impenetrable (but breakable) barrier shatters like glass, making the evil computer of the tower self-destruct while it letting out three Big Nos.
• Code Lyoko features Aelita doing this in the final episode of season 2, but it was stopped by Jeremie. Her motives here are complex and confusing, blending a bit of Goodbye Cruel World with Heroic Sacrifice and Martyr Without A Cause. Yes, all of those apply.
• Bill Dauterive of King Of The Hill had periodic bouts with depression turn so bad that he became suicidal especially on Christmas when this was the time his wife divorced him. Bill's suicide attempts were played seriously, but his neighbors' reactions to it were not. Hank was annoyed by having to take time off of work to go on "suicide watch", Dale didn't care if Bill died or not and was eager to steal his stuff, and Boomhauer was tired of it eating up so much of his time.
• One of Disney's Wartime Cartoons, The Old Army Game, had Donald Duck attempting to shoot himself after he believed he had been sawed in half.
• Though it's not called suicide, nor is death even alluded, the Wonderful Life episode of Fairly Odd Parents had Timmy eventually concluding that, since everyone's apparently happy in the world where he was never born, he should forfeit his own right to exist. For clarity, this is a ten-year-old boy who comes to the depressed conclusion that he only causes misery in others so he should just accept being erased from existence. Sure, it's all a Secret Test Of Character, but the realization needed to "pass" the test was, for all intents and purposes, " my suicide will make everyone else happy."
• In The Lion King 2, If you thought it looked like Zira smiled during her fall, it's because she did. It was originally a suicide, but that did not make it past storyboard stage, probably because it was considered too dark for a child friendly film.
• Sponge Bob Square Pants had an episode involving Plankton attempting suicide due to Mr. Krabs's Knight Templar tendencies. After an unsuccessful attempt he actually said "Can't you see I'm trying to get run over?" to Spongebob.
  • Spongebob's bad breath made his reflection commit suicide by smashing the mirror with a hammer
  • Patrick made Le Spatula commit suicide by walking off a cliff, causing an explosion after Patrick made a hamburgers with cheese cover all over it. It is reveal that Le Spatula have a family verisons of itself.
    • In the same episode there are two fish who bite on a fishing hook to get reeled up.
  • In the episode "Are you happy now?" when Squidward goes into a depression he sticks his head in the oven but is really taking brownies out. In another part he throws a rope with a loop in the end over the ceiling but is really hoisting up a bird cage.
• You could make a drinking game out of all the references to suicide in Brave Little Toaster. Within the first few minutes, Phil Hartman violently self-destructs. Main characters routinely throw themselves off of cliffs, deliberately onto high places during a heavy thunderstorm, and into certain death. (Although they were all for heroic purposes.) There's one scene in particular where a lone flower wilts and dies after realizing its isolated fate. There is a can opener/lamp/shaver character who strangles itself with its own cords onscreen for not knowing its purpose. By the end of the movie, there's a cast of ruined vehicles in a junkyard which sing about how they're 'worthless', with themes of despair, regret, intolerance, and loneliness, one of them even willingly driving straight into a gigantic shredder to be NightmareFuel compressed into small metal cubes. Hey, it was TheEighties a different time.
• {{spoiler|The Big Bad of Season 1, Nox]] in Wakfu, after he finds that even after slaughtering countless creatures for 200 years to power magic beyond the power of gods, even after performing said magic, that was said to most likely destroy the universe even if it worked at all, perfectly as intended, {{spoiler|and traveling back in time, so that he can save his family... all the reserves of power he stored in 200 years, allowed him to rewind time for only 20 minutes, meaning that both his family and victims of all but the latest of his genocides will stay dead. After that he just lies on the graves of his wife and children and lets the magic that kept him alive go, turning to dust and leaving only his armor and bandages behind]].
• In Star Wars The Clone Wars, a Twi'lek slave, having failed to assassinate her master, leaps to her death rather than continue living as a slave.
  • This is somewhat dark, considering that the show is meant for children.
• Spider- Carnage at the end of Spider Man The Animated Series. Completely insane and aware that he cannot drive the symbiote off of him, he hurls himself into an unstable vortex and disintegrates. Horrifyingly, this was probably best for everyone involved, himself included.
• In the season one finale of The Legend Of Korra, Tarrlok realizes what he's become, and doesn't feel that he and his brother deserve freedom, and kills them both. One of the most poignant moments of the series.
  • In a far more humorous use of the trope, Jinora tells a tale of a princess who discovered she could not be with her one true love, and so rode into battle on a dragon, burned down an entire country before jumping into a volcano. She feels this is the best way for Korra to deal with her own crush.

Other Edit

• Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. Not too bad, until you realize that cars are on the road, and then you realize what the "other side" means.

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