Summary:

Mikko Myllykangas, The Importance of Healthy and Disciplined Lifestyle in Suicide Prevention–Doctoral Thesis by Th. Saelan, Published in 1864

Suicide is a rare and exceptional act. Despite of this fact, the amount of works dealing with suicide is quite remarkable. Suicide is an enigma yet to be solved. The earliest written texts on suicide are over two thousand years old. The modern discourse on suicide developed alongside the birth of modern medicine and statistics in the 19th century. In the history of suicide, the transition which took place in the 18th and 19th centuries has been labeled as the secularization of suicide. Prior to that period, suicide was mostly a subject of philosophical and theological discourses which strove to solve the moral dilemma of suicide. As the modern discourse on suicide emerged, attention was turned to the social phenomenon itself.

Anders Thiodolf Saelan was a prominent person in the history of Finnish psychiatry. His doctoral thesis Om Sjelfmordet i Finland i statistiskt och rättsmedicinskt afseende, published in 1864, was one of the first Finnish studies to deal with suicide. Saelan applied statistics as the main method of inquiry and thus set the stage for the subsequent studies on suicide in the late 19th and 20th centuries. One could say that the next turning point in the modern suicide discourse in Finland occurred from the 1970’s onwards, with the increasing prominence of psychiatry and psychology.