How to kill yourself in Finland

It's simple, take your family and loved ones with you.

This morning, a 40-year-old man was driving his car just outside rural Helsinki and swerved onto a an oncoming truck. The man died on impact and the car was destroyed, bursting into violent flames - the truck driver was unharmed. Police and medics arrived on the scene and after figuring out the man's identity, they tried to reach his wife to deliver the sad news. They could not reach her and ordered a patrol car to visit the house of the deceased.

They found the wife in the house, murdered, along with the couple's two children, both less than five years old.

The crazy thing is that this is becoming a Finnish tradition. Just this past year, there have been seven similar cases. A parent or both parents decide that life is not worth living anymore and also make a pretty arbitrary decision for their children as well. If the heads of the house can't go on, neither should their seed. Now, Finland has some pretty gruesome statistics when it comes violent murders and suicide rate, but these all-or-nothing family cases have increased alarmingly during the last decade. In families with children, a parent offing only themselves is starting to become an exception to the rule.

Many of us have been at low points in our lives, First World problems or not, but the thought of depriving your loved ones of the possibility for a normal life, or even just existing is pretty devastating and hard to understand. Many cases have been about funds, money - someone gets fired or bankrupts their company; all is lost, better just kill my family and be done with it.

Many of these cases are even more tragic because they come completely out of the blue. With the most recent cases, there have been no records or reported history of abuse or psychological issues in the assailants nor their environment. Few reports have come out that investigators have concluded jealousy or spite to be indicative in some of these cases. To be so jealous of someone's life moving on...

They have just snapped and stolen lives of their loved ones out of pure selfishness. I want to loathe them, but even more I would like to understand what creates these situations, situations where the only way out is full-blown.


April 2011:
Father kills former spouse, their son and himself.

October 2011:
Father kills wife and 10-year-old son with a knife and jumps to his death.

November 2011:
Two young children die in fire. Father is badly burned but rescued - admits setting the fire.

December 2011:
Mother kills two young daughters and tries to kill herself, but is saved in the ER.

Father kills two daughters and wife and tries to kill himself with a machete, is apprehended by the police and lives.

January 2012:
Man kills wife and two daughters with a knife, sets fire to the apartment and waits for the police to arrive, admits eveything.



And now this case today. It's a pretty sullen trend.