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Increase in Suicides

10%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 5, 1907

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 84, No. 35.

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Increase in Suicides

By Daniel H. Kress

D. H. KRESS, M. D.
DURING the past year the number of suicides in the United States will probably (according to reports from a large number of States) reach twenty per cent more than for the previous year.
History affords evidence that increase in suicides is always an indication of, or traceable to, increase in moral degeneracy or mental imbecility. The slightest provocations are sufficient to lead one whose mind is weakened or unbalanced, “to end it all.”
There can be no doubt that the same causes which are responsible for the increase in divorces and insanity, are also responsible for the increase in suicides.
What are the causes of this mental despondence and derangement? We need not go far to ascertain a few of the most prominent ones. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and those popular beverages, tea, coffee, and cocoa, all act upon the brain and nervous system in such a way as to unbalance them. Wherever these are freely used, suicides, it can be shown, are rapidly on the increase.
In Holland a Utrecht professor, who is making a wide scientific reputation in his new chair of “Pychiatry,” said that “whereas up to this time women had been the resuscitating and repairing element in races that must otherwise have become physically and morally effete, now that women are beginning to use alcohol and tobacco, these races must in future be deprived of their sanest and soundest factor.”
Sir William Gull says: “All things of an alcoholic nature injure nervous tissue pro tempore if not altogether.” And Dr. Lauder Bronton says: “The effect of alcohol upon the nervous system may be described as one of progressive paralysis.”
The constant artificial stimulation of the brain by the use of these poisonous narcotic drugs is slowly yet surely undermining will power in the human race, and paving the way for the further increase in divorce, insanity, and suicide.
Takoma Park, D. C.