Historical aspects of suicide in the old age (author's transl)]

Beginning with a very different attitude of the antiquity taken up to suicide, which was normally not regarded as a self-murdering but as a voluntary departing this life and as such as a philosophically based act of liberty especially by members of the stoic system who not seldom commited suicide themselves, another estimation is discussed which was exercised by the Pythagoreans and the members of the Aristotele's doctrine. They rejected suicide as immoral. The suicide in the old age was regarded under the different aspects of old age and his positive and negative evaluation. As predecessor of the absolute refusal of suicide in the Christian era can be mentioned Cicero, who had regarded suicide in a special paper on the old age as the desertion without order of the commander-in-chief. However with the renaissance this attitude against the suicide changed and now the first time in the Christian era the possibility was discussed that very dangerously ill patients could end their pains by suicide. In the time of enlightenment more and more people thought, that very much cases of suicide were committed in severe illness. Especially suicide in the old age was regarded more and more as a psychiatric problem. There were new aspects contributed by medical statistics which could shown clearly the increase of tendency to suicide in the higher age of men. Today the question is vividly discussed if suicide in the old age is more the result of special environmental factors in the sense of isolation or economic instability or is produced by pathological processes in the brain such as cerebral sclerosis.