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Concept
Charcoal-burning suicide
Summary
Charcoal-burning suicide is suicide by burning charcoal in a closed room or area. Death occurs by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon monoxide poisoning
As the charcoal burns, the concentration of carbon monoxide (CO), produced by the incomplete combustion of carbon, gradually increases. CO concentrations of as little as one part per thousand can be fatal if inhaled over a period of two hours.
One of the earliest known suicides by inhalation of charcoal fumes may have been that of Seneca (65 AD) as well as Amédée Berthollet (1811), son of Claude Louis Berthollet. The suicide method also appears in nineteenth-century literature such as Eugène Sue's The Wandering Jew (1844).
Two students of Taipei First Girls' High School ended their lives by charcoal-burning in a hotel in Su'ao, Yilan in July 1994. They left a note that did not state the reason for killing themselves clearly, even though that it was suspected in some mass media that they were a lesbian couple.
A middle-aged woman in Hong Kong took her own life using this method inside her small, sealed bedroom in November 1998. She had a chemical engineering background. She was suffering from an economic depression at the time, and suicide in general was increasing. After the details of this suicide were highly publicised by local mass media, many others killed themselves in this way (an example of the Werther effect). Within two months, charcoal-burning had become the third major suicide killer in Hong Kong. Charcoal-burning suicide accounted for 1.7% of Hong Kong suicides in 1998 and 10.1% in 1999. By 2001, it had surpassed hanging as the second most-common method of suicide in Hong Kong (second only to jumping), accounting for about 25% of all suicide deaths. The method has since spread to mainland China, Taiwan and Japan.
Starting in 2003, authorities in Japan have seen a series of group suicides committed by strangers who met in suicide chat rooms online. Such a group will typically use sleeping pills and charcoal stoves in a van parked in a remote area.
Official source
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