Driven to Suicide

He got better -- his life, alas, did not.

Whatever the reason - for fear or shame, (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 honourable, 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.

For any tropers who feel this way, You Are Not Alone. There are numbers you can call. Please, talk to someone.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

No real life examples, please; we don't have any reason to torment the survivors by reminding them of this.

Examples of Driven to Suicide include:

Advertising

• A recent^[when?] "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 and Manga

• Arguably, Yomodo Chisa in Serial Experiments Lain. Although it's heavily implied that she did it to escape the Epiphanic Prison of reality, in theory the corrupting contact with 'God' made her do it.
• Several in Monster. After Nina finally regains most of her memories, Tenma had to talk her out of suicide.
  • Then, of course, there's Johan, who's entire life's work and goal can be chalked down to the perfect suicide. Unfortunately, he feels it necessary to take the world with him...
  • And Johan is also an expert at driving perfectly sane and normal people to suicide through total Mind Rape. And he does it a lot.
• Yuria, Kenshiro's fiancee of Fist of the North Star, throws herself off a building after witnessing the atrocities committed in her name by Shin (who had taken her away from Kenshiro), aided and abetted by Shin declaring that with the current Southern Cross burning down, he'll build a new one bigger and better than the last, which Yuria sees as an excuse for more death and destruction and in HER name to boot. Later on, Shin himself throws himself off of the very same building as a point of pride after Kenshiro mortally wounds him, intending to die from the impact, before the Kenshiro-inflicted mortal wound. In Yuria's case, however, she survived. Only for us to learn she's dying of radiation poisoning anyway. Well, at least she gets to spend her last days with Kenshiro...
• After being part of a genocidal slaughter, Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist felt so guilty over the horrors he participated in that he tried to commit suicide by eating his gun right on the spot, but was stopped from pulling the trigger by his mentor Dr. Marcoh (in the first anime)/his best friend Maes Hughes (in the manga).
  • In the manga, Riza threatens to kill Roy when it looks like he's going off the deep end. He asks what she will do when he's dead, and she admits she plans to kill herself, since there will be nothing left for her to live for. That's enough to convince Roy to step down.
  • Moments after the above, Envy ends his own life by destroying his own Philosopher's Stone to avoid what he perceives as the ultimate humiliation: being beaten and actually pitied by lowly humans.
• In the last episode of Gravitation, Eiri Yuki, after remembering his troubled past, is about to pull the trigger on his life when Shuichi arrives in the nick of time.
• My-HiME has two: Yukariko Sanada prefers to kill herself and her love interest Ishigami, rather than killing the main character and Natsuki kills herself and Shizuru, since they're each other's Most Valuable Persons and the death of one of them would trigger the other's as well.
• Godchild: In volume 2, Emile allows himself to fall off the roof of his mansion to his death because he feels guilty for having a "filthy" soul and doesn't want to tarnish his stepsister Lukia, who he loved more than anyone. Cain tried to save him, and probably would have succeeded, had it not been for the intervention of Big Bad Alexis.
• Played completely for laughs in Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei where the main character, a teacher (above), tries to commit suicide because of every minor thing that happens to him, usually more than Once an Episode. He even has a book with names of people who might join him and tries to get his pupils to sign up.
  • Said teacher will always fail by being COMPLETELY invulnerable in the long run. He's even survived having his name written in the Death Note.
• Welcome to The NHK has every major character except Yamazaki attempt suicide at least once, always by jumping off a cliff. Sato has TWO suicide attempts. He doesn't want to commit suicide initially either time, and the second he starts out trying to stop his friend's suicide attempt. Incidentally, he does get off the cliff the second time. He doesn't die due to a metal grating that was installed to prevent suicides at that particular cliff.
• In Tantei Gakuen Q, Ryu Amakusa seriously ponders suicide after being told by Anubis, the sub-leader of the criminal organization (Pluto/Meiousei) he reluctantly belongs to, that there's no way he can escape from them. It doesn't help that he was almost killed by another Meiousei member when he attempted to save his partner and best friend, Kyuu Renjou from them. He's standing next to a bridge and is just about to jump off, but Kyuu appears and talks to him, which makes Ryu swear off suicide.
  • In another episode, a secretary who had recurred to Pluto/Meiousei to get revenge on the death of her lover at the hands of her evil bosses whips out a knife after being unmasked as the assassin, saying she had planned to kill herself from the beginning so she could be reunited with her lover. Anubis attempts to brainwash the woman into killing the DDS team instead, but she's stopped just in time.
• Princess Serenity in the Sailor Moon manga killed herself in a past life after the Big Bad offed her fiance. She also succeeded at a Murder-Suicide on a Brainwashed and Crazy Tuxedo Mask, but was brought back to life by the other sailor soldiers who sacrificed their own lives to do it.
  • In the anime, Bertier tries to use all of her power to freeze herself and Mercury after two of her sisters taunt her and claim they'll take the credit regardless of if she lives or not. Subverted in that her other sister Koan (who's now a normal human) convinces her she's still loved and allows Sailor Moon to purify her and let her become human as well.
• Chika Ogiue in Genshiken tried to throw herself off the roof of her old school after her "friends" severely traumatized a boy she liked by showing him extremely graphic drawings she'd made of him. She survived. She ends up with the Genshiken after hurling herself out a window following a fight with the Manga Club, as well (ending up with a broken arm), and at one point has to be stopped from doing it again by Saki.
  • Actually for Ogiue it is pretty much a Running Gag that she will jump out of the nearest window when she seems to be losing an argument.
• Princess Tutu has at least two main characters consider suicide during the show. Also, an early episode about a Wili Maiden states that she is the ghost of a woman who committed suicide when she was betrayed by her love.
• In Great Teacher Onizuka, Noboru Yoshikawa attempts suicide by jumping off the school building twice because of his unceasing torment bordering on sexual abuse at the hands of Anko Uehara. As is usually the case, Onizuka helped him through it both times.
  • Onizuka also saves a lot of other students from suicide (his class is full of problem kids).
• Gunslinger Girl: Henrietta clearly exhibited suicidal tendencies before her conversion, but it's obvious that most of the other girls didn't have a lot going for them before they became cyborgs, either. It doesn't end well for Henrietta and Jose.
• In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, most people who reach the final stage of Hinamizawa Syndrome die by clawing out their own throats - including Keiichi in Onikakushi-hen, Tomitake in every arc except Matsuribayashi-hen, and attempted by Satoshi in the backstory, though he was stopped. Also, Natsumi does this in Someutsushi-hen. One other one that might be worthy of note - the game's ending of Meakashi-hen has Shion after she falls from the window fall onto a lower roof and then choose to roll off that roof onto the ground. It's an open question whether she would have survived had she not done that. There are also several other deaths which appear to be Driven to Suicide, but turn out to be murder: Rika's mother in the backstory (seen to be murder in Matsuribayashi-hen) and Dr. Irie in Tatarigorshi-hen (seen to be murder in Minagoroshi-hen.
  • After the events of Tatarigoroshi-hen, Keiichi is driven to suicide in what is implied to be a different manner, since he was stopped and sent to a mental institution. Hey, if you'd just managed to curse death upon your entire village successfully after being shoved off a bridge by your adopted sister, you might go a little nuts too.
    • Don't forget his God complex. He thought he was a God, due to everyone he said he wished dead, died. Coincidentally.
    • Shion does the same thing as Keiichi in Tatarigoroshi-hen (and, implicitly, most other arcs with the exception of the "real" Tsumihoroboshi-hen, where everyone died in the school explosion, rather than the gas disaster), according to the victim roll. The only difference is that she isn't stopped. Not sure whether it's similar to what happened in Watanagashi-hen/Meakashi-hen, however. Although she wasn't implied to have had an episode of Hinamizawa Syndrome at the time, she could have easily been in the second wave of cases that Onisarashi-hen explores.
  • She commits suicide. Unlike in the anime, in the manga and sound novels she fell onto a pillar and stayed there bleeding (due to the fall), perfectly stable, until she decided to let herself fall.
  • Also, Rena, in every world, minus the "good" world. However, it's an attempted suicide, before Higurashi begins. She gets better,usually.
• One particularly cruel version of this trope happens in Fushigi Yuugi. Chiriko, the Teen Genius of the Suzaku Seishi, is possessed by the evil priest Miboshi from the Seiryuu Seishi, and the only was to kick him out of his body was commiting suicide and killing both of them in the process. Of course, Chiriko did this by stabbing himself to death, despite his friends' pleas to stop.
  • There's some attempted suicides from other characters before that, too. Most notably, Yui tries to slit her wrists because she believes that she was gang raped and that Miaka had abandoned her to that fate... even though both of those reasons are lies fed to her by Nakago in order to turn her against her friend.
  • Additionally, in the second OVA, one of the villains uses mind control to manipulate Tasuki's hidden feelings for Miaka into a Near-Rape Experience. When his friends finally break through to him and he realizes what's going on, the combination of horror at what he's done and desperation to stop himself lead Tasuki to blow himself up with his own fire attack.
  • And finally, in the series Miaka tries to drown herself when Tamahome was Brainwashed and Crazy. Hotohori had to dive in ans save her.
    • Also in the 3rd OVA, Mayo attempts to drown herself in that pond when she realizes what a psycho bitch she had been and that she's nearly destroyed the world just to get Tamahome. Much to the Fan Dumb's dismay, Tamahome goes in after her and brings her back, allowing her to Must Make Amends and save the Universe of the Four Gods.
• Heero Yuy harbored a good deal of self-loathing in Gundam Wing because of the remorse he felt for his victims, especially after killing a little girl he had befriended, as seen in The Movie. He only performed what could be as suicidal actions twice, the rest being a fandom-imposed Flanderization.
  • At least he doesn't get all angsty about it. The only time he actively tried to kill himself was when he used his Gundam's self destruct, but that was only because it seemed at the time that he had failed his mission. The other times, he was "just" a Death Seeker.
• Rossiu attempts to shoot himself in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann after realizing just how much of an Evil Chancellor he had become. Simon stops him with a Dynamic Get a Hold of Yourself, Man! punch delivered through hyperspace. This is TTGL we're talking about here.
  • LET'S SEE YA GRIT! THOSE! TEETH!
• In Ranma ½, Akane is staring wistfully at the pool, depressed that she can't swim worth a damn, while standing at the water's edge. Principal Kuno thinks she's about to commit suicide, and rushes in to stop her... by pushing her into the pool.
• Narutaru has Akira Sakura, a cripplingly shy and depressed girl who is seen tentatively taking a razor blade to her wrist in the first episode/chapter she appears in, and later grabs a soldier's gun and points it to her own head. Eventually, in the manga, it appears that she does kill herself by throwing herself out of a hospital window onto the street below. Given what happens to all the other major characters, she probably got the closest thing to a 'happy' ending out of anyone.
• One, possibly two of the Children in Neon Genesis Evangelion attempt suicide, though the suicide is implied rather than explicitly shown. Asuka is found naked and barely conscious in a bathtub with what may be slit wrists, and Shinji is shown at the beginning of End of Evangelion clearly dampened from an spoiler:attempted drowning. Rei also succeeds in killing herself by blowing up her Eva, but that was a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • And the conclusion to the series shows a mass suicide. The aftermath rather than the act itself, but still...
• In the first Rurouni Kenshin OVA, Kenshin ends up living with Tomoe Yukishiro, who is actually trying to get revenge on him for assassinating her fiancé. However, she falls in love with him, forgives him and decides to give up on the plot to kill him. When she finds out the conspirators won't have none of it, as they don't give a crap about her personal vendetta and only want to off Battousai for their own reasons, having used her as bait, she tries to kill herself with the knife she's been carrying around since the beginning. They stop her, and she tries biting off her tongue instead. She doesn't succeed, but she soon dies anyway in a Heroic Sacrifice complete with Slipknot Ponytail and blood soaked snow.
  • Megumi Takani was Driven to Suicide by Aoshi, but the heroes got there in time.
• In Infinite Ryvius Airs Blue threatens to kill himself as a last resort, and even goes so far as to hold the gun to his head. It doesn't happen.
• Asshole Victims in Detective Conan seem to have this as their side job.
  • Some Sympathetic Murderers try/do that too, like the Anti Villainous cross dresser Seiji/Narumi.
  • Shinichi/Conan himself tried his best to avoid driving criminals to suicide after Pulling the Thread on the criminal; the only failure being Seiji/Narumi of the Moonlight Sonata case, above.
• An episode of Paranoia Agent deals with a group of friends online making a suicide pact... only for the two men in the group to respond in horror when they find out the third member of their group is really a young elementary school girl. They spend the rest of the episode trying to shake the girl and foil her suicide attempts, while succeeding in their attempts, only to fail in increasingly bizarre ways. In the end of the episode, it turns out they all died during the men's first attempt, and their attempts afterwards have been failing because they're ghosts and already dead. It probably says a lot about the series that this is actually one of the most lighthearted episodes in the entire series.
• Mahou Sensei Negima: Yue seems to be like this after finding herself in a love triangle with her best friend and Negi; she feels like she's betrayed her friend and jumps off a waterfall. Subverted as it turns out she had a grappling hook. Double subverted when the grappling hook breaks. Triple subverted when it turns out that when the grappling hook breaks, she was close enough to the bottom to land without injury.
• Because Kids Are Cruel, Flame of Recca's Kaoru Koganei attempts to slit his wrists. He was stopped by Kurei (whom Kaoru would eventually come to see as an older brother), but still cut deep enough to leave a scar on one wrist.
• Chobits: Freya becomes weak and catatonic, eventually killing herself, when she realizes her love for her father can't be requited.
• Full Moon o Sagashite: in the manga, those who kill themselves become Shinigami. There is some debate as to whether this is a a punishment or not.
  • In the anime Mitsuki attempts suicide twice. Once she tries sleeping out in the snow on Eichi's grave so she could join him in death. And a second time she tries jumping off the hospital roof. Only to be rescued by Takuto.
• Eugene in Hanasakeru Seishounen, bonus points for the fact that he wanted to die the same age as his mother committed suicide due to a complicated revenge plot on the part of Volkan. Eugene's suicide is averted, though, by Kajika. At the beginning, they find out that he has driven at least three women to suicide.
• A very tragic example of an already tragic trope from from Let Dai, in a terribly ironic fashion: Eunhyung. After much sorrow from being gang raped and becoming utterly alienated from the world at large she finally begins to recovers, rumors at school and eavesdropping on the boy she likes confessing his love for her sister finally take her to the edge. Ironically, said boy then goes to correct this assertion and expresses his love to Eunhyung who no longer hears this part of the conversation. To make matters even more painful, the boy makes a public confession via a banner that he hangs at her school... only to be informed that she committed suicide the day before. A true Tear Jerker moment.
• Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ. Haman Karn's entire Neo Zeon regime collapses when an uprising from within her own ranks results in the mutual annihilation of both factions, effectively crushing her ambitions for dominion over Side 3 and the political influence it enabled her to exert on the Earth Sphere. In addition, the only people she's ever shown interest in reject her. Haman essentially loses everything she?s ever valued or hoped for, and being left with no better option available to her, she chooses to just put an end to her misery.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory: Stardust Memories. Kou gets court-martialed for stealing the GP-03 after the GP-01 gets destroyed, but is released after Captain Synapse commits suicide to take responsibility for it.
• Chaos;Head. Takumi in the penultimate chapter of the game; first by wandering into Yamanote Doori traffic, then by hanging himself in his apartment. Considering that he'd just found out he doesn't exist, all his memories after the age of 12 are fake, he is in fact a delusionary existence created by HIMSELF (the real, wheelchair-bound, terminally ill one), and that Rimi, the only human being he cares about, knew all of this all along (and has abandoned him after telling him all this), it's hard to blame him.
  • Later, he gets better... just in time for everything to REALLY go to hell.
• Misa Amane from Death Note dies one year after Light's death, jumping off a rooftop. However, in the anime it is implied she did the same... when he was dying.
  • Also, in the anime, Teru Mikami stabs himself with a pen.
  • Naomi Misora and Kiyomi Takada are forced into suicide by the Death Note.
• In a rare good character example, a minor ally in Fang of the Sun Dougram commits suicide on screen by shooting his brains out.
• In Saikano, the scientist who made Chise what she is eventually comes face to face with the consequences of his work. He shoots himself to death.
• Yukio Washimine in Black Lagoon, who pierces her neck with the also deceased Ginji's trusty katana at the end of the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc.
• In a particularly tense scene in GITS: Solid State Society, Togusa is ghost-hacked by the Puppeteer and forced to take his daughter to the hospital, where the Puppeteer informs Togusa that she will be given a cybernetic body so she too can be kidnapped, whereupon Togusa's memory of ever having a daughter will be wiped. The Puppeteer then releases Togusa's gun arm, giving him the option of committing suicide instead. Fortunately the Major has been tracking Togusa the whole time and is able to save him.
• Shiori and Sayuri in Kanon. The former believes she has a month left to live, and her sister, perhaps the only person she has been living for, rejects her. The latter was destroyed by guilt when she believed that the way she treated her baby brother led to him dying of a terminal illness. Neither manages to go through with it.
• In Akumetsu chapter 32, one of the bankers spared by Akumetsu decides to commit suicide rather than face up to Akumetsu's demands.
• Kotaroh of Pita-Ten does so rather than lose Misha when she is forced to return to heaven.
• X eggs in Shugo Chara happens when they have too much stress to unable to handle it, they break themselves which sends waves of sadness the X eggs have stored in them.
• In D.Gray-man, main protagonist Allen Walker attempts to slit his own throat in order to stop his Innocence from harming someone who was having an And Then John Was a Zombie moment. While the attempt was quickly interrupted, it gives a whole new grim meaning to Allen's earlier promise that he would stop The 14th if he attacked the Order.
• Doc in Texhnolyze.
• In Sakura Gari both Masataka (neck piercing with a knife) and Souma (slitting his wrists and then placing his arms ina bath tub) either consider or attempt to kill themselves but fail. Souma's sister Sakurako successfully manages to commit suicide in chapter 9, slitting her wrists open (apparenrly with the family's katana) and then drowning herself in a nearby pond.
• In chapter two of Gunjo the women run into a lady who wants to kill herself out of guilt for the death of her son.
• In the first few chapters of Bakuman｡, Mashiro Moritaka thinks his uncle Mashiro "Kawaguchi Taro" Nobuhiro, who was said to have died from overworking himself, committed suicide because he was unable to follow up on his successful manga series with another one, and was deep in debt. After going to his uncle's studio and seeing the effort he put into making submissions (as the editor in chief of Shonen Jump points out, he submitted one five days before his death), he realizes that his uncle had never given up, making this a subversion.
• Chapter 38 of Franken Fran begins with a student, despondent from a lifetime of bullying, jumping off of a building. The plot of the chapter begins when he lands... on Fran Madaraki.
• In the Romantic Trilogy Super Robot series (Combattler V, Voltes V and Daimos), all the dragons in their respective series chose to end their lives; one of them for not having any more reason to live and the only option left is to die in an obviously unwinnable battle as the Proud Warrior Race Guy that he is; and the other two for deciding that they have given the people around them too much grief and suffering to even have a right to continue living.
• Tohma of Magical Chronicles Lyrical Nanoha Force, upon realizing that the events of the series had turned him into someone who could only live if he constantly kills other people, jumped off the airship he was in, hoping that he could end his life before his out-of-control powers could kill the people he cares about. Unfortunately, his Super-Powered Evil Side had different ideas.
• In Holyland, Yuu wanted to commit suicide in the backstory but could not bring himself to take the step when he was actually at the rooftop. Masaki has scars on his wrist from an attempt.
• In My Lovely Ghost Kana, the titular Kana is dead via suicide on the very first page. Daikichi is on the verge until he meets Kana's ghost, as is Utako. Fortunately, they all got better.
• In Brigadoon Marin and Melan, two different characters are tempted to drown themselves, for different reasons, in the second half of the anime. They Got Better.
• And then there's the cute scene in 'Windaria' where the starcrossed lovers, Princess Ahnas and Prince Jihl meet in the forest for a romantic rendezvous. The Princess playfully steals the Prince's handgun in their game of tag, ending with the two in a sweet embrace when he retrieves it. Fast forward then, as Jihl's Father plunges the the two countries into a brutal and very bloody war, in which honor and duty forces the lovers to face each other commanding opposite sides ... ... where Princess Ahnas, seeing no other way out, in a desperate attempt to end the conflict, offers to meet her beloved off the battlefield. In one of anime's best, most under-appreciated and most heartbreaking scenes Ahnas and Jihl meet ... they embrace ... the Prince shudders, his eyes go dull and he falls. For, once again, Ahnas had stolen his handgun. She places the barrel to her temple, closes her eyes, and then pulls the trigger.
• In Eureka Seven movie, Eureka shared her story to Renton of her 8 years under the military imprisonment. Apparently the torture is so great that the thought of suicide crossed Eureka's mind several times but her desire and love for Renton motivated her to survive.
• In Yami no Matsuei, Tsuzuki succeeded with this when he was a human, and a while later he became a Shinigami. (Which explains why he wangsts so much about his work). Later, he tries to comit suicide again thanks to Muraki, and Hisoka has to hug him and beg him to not do so.
• Black Paradox is a manga about 4 people gathering together to commit a group suicide. Creepy things happen instead.
• In Naruto Kakashi Hatake's father, Sakumo Hatake, deserves mentioning. He and his team were sent on an important mission for Konoha. When his comrades were in danger, Sakumo chose to abandon the mission and save them. The mission's failure was a big blow to the village, and consequently everyone came to hate Sakumo, even the ninjas he saved. Sakumo fell into a deep depression, soon dropping training and his skills altogether before he committed suicide.
• The manga version of the Trigun flashback arc, which reveals to us the background of both Vash and Big Bad Knives, with Freudian Excuse and a side of showing what the crap is up with the setting, features this. From Vash 'I disapprove of suicide more than anything' the Stampede himself, no less, and twice. Contains a heavy helping of Better to Die Than Be Killed, and a lot of disillusionment.
  • First, the twins lock themselves in the lab where they found out about Tesla for a week without food or water, with apparent intent to die, and then after Rem has broken in while they were unconscious and nursed them back to health, Vash wakes up and goes for the knife she's using to peel fruit. He got better.
• Mitsumi from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure. She decides to stay inside the Team Galactic HQ even though it's collapsing, saying that she won't be haunted by her past. Luckily Jun comes in and saves her.
• Kasumi in King of Thorn, although it's a bit complicated. She originally tries to kill herself in the bath, unable to cope with the fact that she'll live and Shizuku will die, but is stopped in time by Shizuku. Then, when she and Shizuku are standing on a cliff, she suggests a dual-suicide, and ends up falling off it and dying anyway. Then, after finding out what Shizuku has become, Medusa!Kasumi tries to throw herself off a high place thinking that it'll help her twin, and in order to be with Marco, but is stopped by Zeus.
• Happens a few times in Lupin III. Fujiko and Zenigata attempt to kill themselves after they think that Lupin was killed by an assassin, and Goemon attempt suicide because his sword was stolen and he felt he was nothing without it.
• Nyu tries to kill herself by wrist-slitting in the Elfen Lied manga, after learning of her Split Personality's Psycho for Hire ways. She fails though.
• One Piece
  • Played for Laughs during the Enies Lobby arc. One member of CP9, Kumadori, will attempt to commit seppuku when someone else on the team screws up. The problem is, he instinctively calls up his rokuskiki power of "Tekkai", which hardens his body so he can't stab himself. He then blubbers dramatically about how he can't die.
  • Trying to kill himself has become a sort of macabre hobby for Kaido. He seems immortal and unable to die, something he sees as a curse. He spends much of his time trying to think up new ways to do it, but all fail. For instance, one notable time he jumped from 10,000 meters from the sky onto the ground, creating a massive shockwave strong enough to sink a large ship nearby. All he got from it was a headache.
  • Also Played for Laughs with Baby 5, an Extreme Doormat who simply cannot say "no" to anybody. When Sai, an enemy from the Happo Navy told her to "just die already" during a fight, she actually tried to turn a gun (crafted from her own hand, via her Devil Fruit power) on herself. (Sai had to stop her before she did.) Of course, while it was funny at the time, it later becomes Harsher in Hindsight when her Dark and Troubled Past is revealed later, something common to most villains in the arc.
  • Definitely NOT Played for Laughs in regards to at least one of the Celestial Dragons' victims. One woman in Doflamingo's backstory states that, after being rescued from slavery, her daughter went mute from trauma, and killed herself three days after she came home.
• In Oniisama e..., Rei, Fukiko, Mariko and Aya all contemplate or try to do this to varying degrees, but ultimately fail. In the manga, Rei actually did commit suicide, by overdosing herself with pills. In the anime, however, she dies in a accident. And in Rei's backstory, her mother commits suicide by drowning herself in the ocean.
• In Revolutionary Girl Utena episode 37 Anthy tries to commit suicide by throwing herself off of a building. Fortunately, Utena saves her.
• Suicide Island: This trope is naturally a big topic in this story. People who attempted suicide will be dropped off on this island if they consent to it, and be declared UnPersons. The story examines why the characters experienced this trope. For some, it was a due to the Crapsack World they're living in. One character, Rai, who seemed so rational and even went into therapy along with Sei, says that he failed, which was why this happened to him. Sei himself is pretty complicated. He started out as a Loners Are Freaks type, but he formed a bond with a young woman and member of the archery club, Eiko-senpai. However, her suicide apparently drove him to Hikikomori levels and then to this trope. Eiko-senpai's suicide was apparently over the fact that she had sex with her sensei, the head of the archery club, and got pregnant from this. The guy was leaving the club and getting married, and when she tried to turn to sensei for help, he refused (Jerkass), which apparently put her in a bad spot. Ouch!
• Claude in the classic manga Natsu e no Tobira a boy named Claude commits suicide after being rejected by a boy he liked.

Comic Books

• 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 (not to mention 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 Gendercide. 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. 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 bandages he 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.
• 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.

Fan Works

• In Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, Naruto commits suicide out of jealousy toward Ronan after Ronan catches him having sex with his wife Sakura.
• 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.

Fairy Tales

• 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

• 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 It's 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 honourable way to make up for his betrayal. He graciously takes it.
• In The Shawshank Redemption, 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 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 Time Cop 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. 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. Say it with me now. What. The. Hell.
• 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 basically 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). Note that this is entirely 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 ancestory. 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. Of course, 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 srtikes 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 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 internalised 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 Mystery Team 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.
• Several people who stayed in room 1408 were driven to this. We also come to find out that this is true of everyone who died in the room. It doesn't actually kill people (though it can come close), but instead tortures them until they do themselves in.
• In The Cube, the man tries to commit suicide by the end, but the gun he's provided with just squirts ink at his head, upon which every character seen so far all show up and laugh at him.
• 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 Cube 2: Hypercube. The first time around he's saved in time by the group, but the second time he voluntarily chains himself to a wall so he can be killed by one of the traps, before swallowing the key.
• 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.

Literature

• 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 disasterously. He crossed his Despair Event Horizon when he forsees 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 descisions, 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 Crap Saccharine 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 atonment for planting a bomb that accidently 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.
• In The Moth Diaries, Ernessa may or may not have committed suicide by slitting her wrists after her father's death (also a possible suicide), which act could have made her a vampire, if she was one, of course. The narrator theorises this - no, she states it as a matter of fact - in one of the very last entries in her journal before she tries to burn down her school; as her mental health was already deteriorating quite early on, we are left unsure. The narrator also contemplates this act, but doesn't go through with it. Her father did this too, which did leave you wondering whether the narrator was imprinting her past onto Ernessa, and fantasising about ending her life in the same way.
• 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 an entire bottle of sleeping pills.
• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame Quasimodo kills himself, due to either being related to or participating in the deaths of everyone he loved.
• 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 Misérables, 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 JRR 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 (not to mention 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 armorbearer refuses to kill him, figuring it would be better to die by his own hand than to be mistreated and killed by the Philistines. An Amalekite, attempting to ingratiate David, takes credit for killing his old enemy, but is executed for his troubles as the new King David goes into a Heroic BSOD, ripping his clothes and screaming for the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. This makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
  • 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.
• In House of Leaves, Holloway Roberts goes Ax Crazy exploring the labyrinth, shoots both of his fellow explorers, and runs around inside the labyrinth talking into his portable camera, constantly repeating his name and where he was born. Several days later he finally shoots himself, having gone insane from fear of something he perceived was following him.
• 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 40,000 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 40,000 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 Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, when the second Last Stand looks even more devasted 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 40,000 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 Cuckoo's Nest, thanks to a manipulative Nurse Ratched threatening him and bringing him back to reality.
• This trope applies to the story of 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 Xanatos Gambit by Multivac that failed... this time.
• In Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Alex's grandfather commits suicide after 'Jonfen' leaves, being confronted with his past , where he saved his life and his son's, at the expense of his best friend's, at the hands of the Nazi's. To bury his guilt, he built himself an anti-Semitic persona, despite being Jewish himself. This is one of the few differences between the book and the movie, where in the movie he does so before he leaves. He is found in a bathtub by his grandson with his wrists slit.
• 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 Eastenders) 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.^[1]
• 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 bludgenoned 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 Blue Lights And Long Nights by Les Pringle (about his experiences during his first 18 months as an Ambulance driver in Birmingham in the 1970's), he and a colleague were once called out, only being told that it was a 'woman burned'. It was worse. It turned out that a woman had been getting her kids ready, had just given them breakfast, and then went outside into the garden, poured petrol over herself and set herself alight. The children then noticed what was going on, and then ran after her mother, trying to douse her with cups of water. When the Ambulance arrived, the woman was little more than a charred corpse on the grass.
• In Richard Stark's Parker, Parker's wife, Lynn, tried to kill him(and thought she did) and becomes wrought with guilt. When Parker comes back to find her, she is relieved at first. Considering it's Parker who comes back though, it doesn't last long. He doesn't even say a word to her before smacking her across her face. He doesn't care about her anymore, and only wants to find the man who betrayed him(and made Lynn try to kill him). She still loves him. She tells him that she can't sleep at night without taking pills. She thinks about how she killed him, and wished it was her. Parker offers a single piece of advice. "Take Too Many Pills." In the morning, when he finds her with an empty container in hand, he says "You always were dumb."
• Jacqueline Wilson wrote an early (and now largely forgotten) novel called Falling Apart in which a teenage girl attempts suicide after being dumped by her boyfriend. She survives, and towards the end of the story her life seems to be improving; but the story shows that she is not over her ex, and hints that she might attempt suicide again.
• On the Jellicoe Road: The Hermit and in a slower version Tate both commit suicide; Jonah and Hannah were stopped before they finished the job.
• In Shadows of the Apt, the Bee-Queen is driven to this by Your Worst Nightmare.
• In The Chalet Girls Grow Up by Merryn Williams, a sequel to the original Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer, Jack Maynard commits suicide after falling into serious financial trouble and Jo becoming increasingly absent-minded and difficult to live with (it is implied that she has Alzheimer's Disease.) This is part of the reason for the book's Broken Base, since in the original series Jack was a strict Catholic and would have considered it a terrible sin to commit suicide.
• In the Gaunt's 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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the book's climax, the Heart of Gold's crew was being fired upon by intergalactic police. 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 From a Buick 8. 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.
• This shows up a lot in The Pale King:
  • Thanks to Leonard's unbridled optimism, his homeroom teacher threatens to kill herself with a pair of blunt scissors.
  • Garrity.
  • Training Officer Pam Jensen intends to soon, and Lane Dean is considering it.
• A recurring theme or plot point in Norwegian Wood. By the end of the novel, four main or secondary characters kill themselves.
• 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.
• The Phantom of the Opera: In Gaston Leroux’s original book, this was Torture Technician Erik’s (the titular phantom) favorite method of disposing of his victims with his Robotic Torture Device. If you are lucky, he only will strangle you to death.
• 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 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 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

• 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.^[2]) 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.
• While Supernatural's Dean selling his soul so his brother can live again in "All Hell Breaks Loose" might look like a Heroic Sacrifice at first glance, it's really, really not. He still thinks he should have died at the beginning of the season, he has a massive guilty conscience about failing to protect his brother, you only have to watch the rest of the season to know that he hasn't been in the best of places for a good, long time and Azazel even says he has a pathetic, self-loathing desire to sacrifice himself for his family. In "Dream a Little Dream of Me", he finally seems to get over his suicidal nature and realises he doesn't want to go to hell. Too bad he's doomed anyway.
  • That's not the only time he's been driven to try (it just succeeded that time). There's "Faith" where he accepts his impending death and lets the reaper try and take him. There's "Dream A Little Dream Of Me" where he takes his rage out on what looks like himself and shoots the doppelganger dead. There's "Croatoan" where Sam might turn violent due to infection and instead of running away, he locks himself in there with him, and then there's "What Is And What Should Never Be" where his perfect girlfriend definitely looks like the Reaper in "My Time Of Dying", his greatest wish is to get some rest (it's unclear whether he just wants a bit of peace or, um, forever rest) and he needs to kill himself to get out of his dreamworld but is perfectly fine with the other option which is dying for real. Oh, Dean!
  • In the season five finale, Dean would rather die with his brother than not be there for him when Lucifer has taken over Sam's body and all hope of stopping him seems gone. He was lost enough throughout the season that he nearly said "yes" to let Michael possess him so Michael could kill Lucifer even though that would raze the world.
    • Sam was suicidal throughout season five as well, first preferring death to possession, then playing out a Self-Sacrifice Scheme to lock Lucifer back up by saying "yes" to let Lucifer possess him and walking into the Cage. If Sam succeeded, he'd be trapped with a vengeful Lucifer to be tortured for eternity by him. Of course, the whole demon blood thing the season before only came about because Dean died and Sam thought he had to use enough blood-fueled power to kill himself killing Lilith to prevent the Apocalypse. This is well after he tried to get Dean to kill him so he wouldn't become a monster.
  • Another episode featured a monster that drove people to suicide by mimicking their dead loved ones and telling them to kill themselves so they can be together again.
  • The episode "Wishing Well" played this for laughs with a teddy brought to life by a little girl's wish that attempts to blow his own head off with a shotgun. He fails.
• 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 Interferrence 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 literally 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 It's 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 Cliff Hanger. That same episode, Zoey Greystone/U-87 also embraced this trope, rather more literally 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 Terriers episode "Change Partners" a masochistic banker who forces his wife to indulge his cuckolding fantasies by having affairs is Driven to Suicide when he realizes that his actions are hurting her. His suicide note reads "I only meant to hurt myself."
• In Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles John, Derrek, Riley, and even 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 pretty much 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 simular to suicide, but Kenzaki finds another way. Both of these also count as attempting Heroic Sacrifice, 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!"
• In the Spanish series El Internado, Fernando tries to kill himself, since to get the medicine keeping him alive, his sister Amelia must work with a group of Nazis; his death would let her stop working for them.
  • Elsa overdoses on pills after she miscarries and Hector divorces her.

Music

• 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 Album Brave 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 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 New Order 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 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 + 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 The Who, 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 ^[3] and admits in the end: "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

• 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

• 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. Of course, 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. Of course, it's entirely Played for Laughs and forgotten immediately afterwards; presumably he didn't do it.

Radio Drama

• 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.

Tabletop Games

• 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

• 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 The Trachiniae 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 Faking the Dead because the information that Friar Lawrence had intended for him never arrived), and Juliet because she wanted to join Romeo in death.
  • Hell, 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. 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 Break the Cutie ordeal that ends with her being forced to accept the original Scarpia Ultimatum 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 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 Miss Saigon 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 Failure Is the Only Option 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.
• Les Misérables had, like the Literature section, Inspector Javert do this.
• The Children's Hour': Martha actually does commit suicide after the rumor of her being a lesbian becomes too much.
• Henrik Ibsen loved this trope. He wrote suicidal characters in A Dolls House, Ghosts (assisted suicide), The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and Hedda Gabler. 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 Real Life 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

• 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

• After spending a year in a coma after The End of the World as We Know It, if you fail to save Cid in Final Fantasy VI, Celes, having lost everything, decides to climbs a cliff to leap off onto the rocks below (which, according to Cid, all other survivors in the island had done when they succumbed to despair). She survives on a miracle, sees Locke's bandanna wrapped around a pigeon's wing, and regains her will to live.
  • Shadow does this in his segment of the game's ending if you have him in your party. To sum up his motivations, he'd let a friend die a very painful death instead of finishing him himself and has carried the guilt for years with him. With the world saved, he stays in the collapsing final dungeon to die and join his friend in death. Complete with him telling his dog to go on without him. Tear Jerker, ahoy.
• God of War starts with Kratos throwing himself off a cliff, with the game being a How We Got Here. Of course, 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 Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney universe, quite a few people in backstories. Redd White in particular is apparently responsible for a large number of instances of this (as the driver, not the drivee).
  • Notably subverted in Justice For All. "Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth Chooses Death." No, he didn't.
    • And played straight in the same case, regarding Adrian Andrews' former mentor Celeste Inpax, who hung herself two years ago after being dumped by Juan Corrida, after he had learned that she was ALSO dumped by his rival Matt Engarde and refused to "accept his leftovers".
    • In addition to that, Adrian Andrews attempted to kill herself less than a week later, unable to bear living without Celeste. She failed.
  • Terry Fawles does it onscreen in the courtroom in Trials and Tribulations. His girlfriend Dahlia really messed him up.
  • Also happens in the fourth game: not in any of Apollo's cases, but in the flashback segment of 4-4, the supposed murder victim, Magnifi Grammarye, committed suicide.
• 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 (High-Pressure Blood and all), traumatising them so badly that Makoto not only breaks up with Sekai, but swears off romance forever.
• In System Shock 2, Dr. Janice Polito was driven to suicide when she found out that she unleashed SHODAN. You find her corpse in her office, and her suicide note in the Rickenbacker church.
• In the My-HiME video game, if the main player gets Natsuki Kuga as a love interest, Natsuki's best friend Shizuru Fujino will go mad and kill herself.
• 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 pretty much 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.
• In Illusion of Gaia - Will is forced into a game of Russian Roulette using a poisoned drink. Will's psychic powers allow him him to dodge the poison, but the other player, Straw Hat, drinks the poisoned shot anyway, out of sheer wounded pride. After this, you read a letter from him telling you he had a terminal disease and was playing the Russian Glass Game so that his pregnant wife would be finacially secure after his death. He had nothing to lose by drinking the poison.
• 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.
• In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, it is revealed that 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.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, it's implied that the reason why the Cobra Unit was still utilizing their microbombs essentially delt with this trope. Similarly, it is also argued that Colonel Volgin being hit by lightning was actually intended on his part, due to the way he was reacting just before he was hit by it.
  • In MGS4, Vamp and Naomi go out this way after disabling the nanomachines keeping them alive.
• In Obs Cure 2, one of the playable characters commits suicide after his girlfriend, and most of his friends have been killed in the 'incidient' at the school. (By incident we mean the surivial horror plot.) The sequel is Darker and Edgier than the orginal, which is no small feat seeing as in the first game everyone dies in horible experiments, or a the hands of the horrible experiments, except for the playable characters.
• The core backstory of the Touhou character Yuyuko Saigyouji is her committing suicide after learning about her power evolving from controlling dead spirits into invoking the death of anything. Fortunately(?) Yukari ensured her spirit could never "cross over" completely, allowing her to continue existing as a Cute Ghost Girl.
• Tai Kaliso in Gears of War 2, after enduring an impossibly brutal series of tortures at the hands of the Locust Horde, puts a shotgun to his chin the moment it is offered to him.
• Mass Effect: not only does Fai Dan shoot himself to escape the Thorian's mind control, but no less than three other characters can also be Driven to Suicide depending on the player's decisions, including Saren.
  • His fate was frustrating for players who were at the time of the scene equipped with anti-Thorian gas grenades that would have saved his life effortlessly if not for the debilitating power of the cutscene.
    • He also shot himself because he felt responsible for what happened, so hitting him with the anti-Thorian grenades probably wouldn't have helped in the long run.
  • Also a Salarian researcher, who shot himself to escape being ripped apart by the rachni.
  • Ronald Taylor can be left a pistol with which to kill himself.
  • In Mass Effect 3, both Tali and Samara can potentially commit suicide. The former if the geth destroy the entire Migrant Fleet, and the latter because she's forced to make a choice between obeying the Justicar Code or killing her daughter.
    • Like Saren before him, The Illusive Man can also be convinced to kill himself to escape Reaper indoctrination in the Grand Finale.
  • The third game loves this trope. The characters listed here? That's not even half the number that this can happen to.
• 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.
• Shiraki Aeka from the visual novel Yume Miru Kusuri: A Drug that Makes You Dream. Delinquent tough guy takes a liking to her, which profoundly enrages his girlfriend, the alpha female of the school. Said alpha female gets most of the class to bully/torment Aeka in various ways, such as shocking her with a disguised stungun during class, leaving used filthy janitor's rags on her desk, ripping up her tuition money, tampering with her textbook, etc. This drives her to attempt suicide in her route's bad end (and all other routes, where the main character expresses regret over not trying to help her).
• 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.
• In Dead Space several members of the USG Ishimura crew who already haven't been turned into Necromorphs commit suicide; examples include the man who headbutts a bulkhead until his head is pulped, the woman in the medical bay who severs her throat with a surgical saw, and a woman in Doctor Challus Mercer's evil Unitology Room Full of Crazy who blasts her own head off. Also Isaac's girlfriend Nicole killed herself via lethal injection before the game began; Isaac just doesn't realize it until the end.
• Many, many examples can be found in The Suffering. At the beginning of the game, for example, several inmates in Cell Block T hang themselves following the earthquake.
  • In a vision of the past, a military commander shoots himself rather than face a court-martial.
  • Another flashback reveals that in 1681, three little girls hurled themselves off a cliff after realising that their seemingly harmless prank had resulted in the execution of eleven innocent people. Unfortunately, they don't stay dead.
  • Hermes Haight, the prison's most infamous executioner, killed himself in the gas chamber; according to his poisonous ghost, this was the final step in a very long obsession with learning what his victims felt.
  • A heroin addict blows his brains out with a shotgun, apparently unable to "weather the low."
  • Three inmates in solitary confinement at East Baltimore Correctional committed suicide rather than spend another six months alone in the darkness.
  • It's revealed that inmate Ranse Truman tried to slit his wrists with a sharpened spoon after spending a few months on Carnate Island and exploring its unique history. When you meet him in the second game, he appears to have tried to cut his throat at some point.
• In Robot Alchemic Drive, Nanao kills herself if the building where she works is crushed too many times.
• HK-47 of Knights of the Old Republic fame jokes about this in the sequel, however he cannot self-terminate.

HK-47: Statement: Oh, yes. My master had quite the collection of tortured individuals that seemed unable to confront their basic personality conflicts. Let me cite some specific examples. Mockery: [mimicking Carth's voice] "Oh, master, I do not trust you! I cannot trust you or anyone ever again!" Mockery: [mimicking Bastila's voice] "Oh, master, I love you but I hate all you stand for, but I think we should go press our slimy, mucus-covered lips together in the cargo hold!" Conclusion: Such pheromone-driven responses never cease to decrease the charge in my capacitors and make me wish I could put a blaster pistol to my behavior core and pull the trigger.

• If you go bankrupt in Theme Park, the game shows a cutscene of the park owner jumping from a window while a family photograph fades, and Chopin's Funeral March plays. Though it turns out he was actually jumping out of a first-story window, as he turns around, grabs the windowsill, and pulls himself back up. As it was a game for all ages, even joking about suicide was pretty controversial. Hell, it even describes what will happen if you go bankrupt in the manual. It's actually pretty creepy. For goodness sake, watch at your own risk.
  • The Mega Drive/Genesis version contains only a still image of that scene, which happens to be the park owner in mid jump.
• 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.
  • Note that if Semolina didn't, Sorbet WOULD have. Yeah...
• The second Oddworld game has several kinds of Mudokons working as slaves for the evil meat-making corporation. Inbetween others there are hyperactive ones who you have to slap to snap them back to sanity, and depressed mopey ones who need to be cuddled to bring up their spirits. But slap a depressed one and watch as he goes over the edge, and repeatedly hits himself in the head until he dies.
• 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.
• In Resident Evil Outbreak, certain members of your team will commit suicide if they have a gun and have been cornered by zombies or have incurred too much damage. Also, in the first level, you can recruit a sick (infected) security guard named Bob; if you help him up to the roof, he says something akin to the hunger being too painful and that he can't go on, then blows his brains out.
• This happens if you scare the teddy bears enough in Naughty Bear.
• At the end of Toshiko's series of missions in Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories, which she has Toni perform against her husband Kazuki in revenge for neglecting her, culminating in his death, she realizes that she has lost everything, and commits suicide by defenestration as Toni watches.
  • In The Ballad of Gay Tony, Tony tries to shoot himself, but the gun ends up being empty.
• At the end of Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Shen Rei shoots himself to prevent his capture and interrogation.
• Ethan Mars from Heavy Rain kills himself in three of his possible endings. They all require him to survive the main storyline but fail to rescue his son, Shaun.
  • Jayden will kill himself via drug overdose if he survives the storyline but Shaun dies.
• Final Fantasy XIII has Sazh almost doing this after his 6-year old son got turned into crystal, and upon learning that his partner Vanilie was involved with his son's fate.
• In Turgor the Nameless Sister does this about in the half of the game. Some of the Void dwellers think it was murder, a Heroic Sacrifice or simply a Senseless Sacrifice.
• In Obs Cure II, Kenny drives Corey to kill himself right before the Final Battle, just to twist the knife.
• The ultimate fate of Priscilla and Raven's parents, Lord and Lady Cornwell in Fire Emblem 7. For worse, Raven believes they were murdered, thus fueling his Revenge.
  • Also, it's hinted that Ninian and Nils seriously considered killing themselves at some point, driven into despair after being summoned, captured and hunted down by the Black Fang. Thankfully, they don't go through it.
  • In Seisen no Keifu, Alvis and Azel's father Lord Victor of Velthomer commited suicide when Alvis was a teen and Azel was a little boy. Alvis starts raising his half-brother from then on.
• 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.
• In the epilogue of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, Aqua ends up all alone in the realm of darkness and seriously considers fading into the darkness. She thankfully snaps out of it due to Terra and Ven's keyblades appearing, but if they hadn't...
• Mamiya Shinzo commits suicide out of guilt and possibly as atonement in several endings of Kara no Shoujo, possibly after killing his son Shinji, who is the second serial killer.
• Claus, aka the Masked Man, commits suicide at the end of Mother 3.
• Because of a certain split-second image in a certain scene in Luigi's Mansion of all games, it is speculated by some that Luigi may have committed suicide and that his appearance in said game is him as a ghost.
• Rehm in The Reconstruction after passing the Despair Event Horizon, though he isn't even able to finish it; some Nalian Officers find him and sell him into slavery instead.
• In Demon's souls, mistress Astria will be kill herself, only if you manage to kill her loyal guard first, and considering the game it's actually the easier path as it's only him, becoming an Anticlimax Boss depending on how you take out the guard, you can wear enchantments and stand just out of his sight of you and make a cloud of poison to slowly kill him.
  • Also, Ostrova, son of the king, will be driven to this no matter what, if you don't kill him first anyway, and you have to face his vengeful/sorrowful spirit a second a later, people's bad side being able to materialize as black phantoms, actually just dark red with a black motif.
• In Sword of the Stars, Liir Black Swimmers who have had to put enemy civilians to the torch usually pilot their spacecraft into nearby stars after hostilities conclude.
• 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, whioch 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 tendences. In Shizune's route, during a talk with Hisao, she tells him "Wouldn't it be better if I disappeared...?"
• In the 2012 reboot of Video Game/Syndicate, it's possible to hack other people's DART chips to force them to kill themselves.
• In the pirated game The Lion King 5 Simba, Timon and Pumbaa will do this on the game over screen.

Web Comics

• 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 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, both times quite literally.
• 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: Trix tries to hang himself after betraying Cap'n Crunch into a fatal ambush. He doesn't succeed, because the tree cuts him off and says "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 Nigh Invulnerable 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.
  • 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 by Meidar, who decides that a girl that wants to be a healer would make a perfect torturer. Possibly a Secret Test of Character 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 ^{[dead link]}
• 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
• Bug sees this as an acceptable response when your web server goes down.
• Lucy does this in "Disaster Dominoes" near the end to join the recently run down Mike.
• A Running Gag across MS Paint Adventures 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 Homestuck. First it was the protagonist of Jail Break, then later an audience member of Problem Sleuth and Homestuck gives it some serious consideration in response to events in the comics themselves.

Web Original

• 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 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; 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. 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; 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!
• General Briggs in the final chapter of Broken Saints.
• 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...ItMakesSenseinContext.
• 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 Final Fantasy X 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 Final Fantasy X. 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

• 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 totally 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 recognise 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 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 dissapear. 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 for authorizing a hippie music festival.
  • 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, The Crow 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.
• 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 themself, such as in Red Hot Riding Hood. These scenes are particularly shocking to modern audiences, and 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.
• 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 enlist his aid in thwarting the bad guys.
• 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 Oddparents 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.
• SpongeBob SquarePants 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
    • 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 cieling 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 an entire cast of dilapidated 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 compressed into small metal cubes. Hey, it was a different time.
• 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, and travelling 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.
• 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.

Other

• 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.

1. ↑ 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.
2. ↑ You die, stupid. That's why it's called "reality."
3. ↑ "There's a body in this stairwell, call the cops I think she's dead"