Suicide | featured news

Health officials say suicides among middle-aged Americans climbed at a startling rate over the past decade, a period that included the recession. Overall, the suicide rate for the age group jumped 28 percent from 1999 to 2010. And among whites, it shot up 40 percent....

An off-duty police officer was believed to have shot and killed her boyfriend and their 1-year-old son, and then turned the gun on herself in an apparent murder-suicide at their Brooklyn home on Monday morning, investigators said. The officer’s 19-year-old son managed to escape the three-story house on East 56th Street by fleeing through a bedroom window after hearing the sound of gunshots, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

The attorney for the family of a California girl who committed suicide after she was sexually battered and then cyberbullied with a humiliating photo plans to file a civil action against the suspects Monday.

Eight days after allegedly being sexually battered while passed out at a party, and then humiliated by online photos of the assault, 15-year-old Audrie Pott posted on Facebook that her life was ruined, "worst day ever," and hanged herself....

A doctor overseeing the French version of the "Survivor" reality show has committed suicide following the sudden death of a contestant who he had treated, France's biggest TV station says. Dr. Thierry Costa killed himself on location Monday on an island in Cambodia, the TF1 station said. Costa, 38, blamed the press for damaging his professional reputation in a handwritten suicide note that TF1 published on its website.

A Louisiana man has been arrested and is accused of using his underage relative to lure a Texas A&M University professor into an online relationship that ended with the professor jumping to his death from a campus parking garage.

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose body was found in the locked bathroom of his luxury mansion near London over the weekend, died by hanging, British police said on Monday.

A college student killed himself in a dorm at the University of Central Florida and authorities found explosives and guns in the room early Monday, authorities said, leading to the evacuation of hundreds of students and cancellation of morning classes.

A 10-month-old baby is miraculously alive today, after surviving a fall from an eighth-story Harlem apartment -- by landing on his mother's chest. Cindy Bacharach, a 44-year-old lawyer, leapt out of her apartment window yesterday afternoon while clutching the child after an argument with her husband, police tell the New York Post. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The husband had apparently left the apartment an hour before her jump, sources tell DNAInfo.

One of the men accused of gang raping and fatally beating a woman on a New Delhi bus was found dead in his jail cell Monday. Police say Ram Singh hanged himself. But his lawyer and parents claim he was murdered. "There was no reason for him to commit suicide. There is some foul play," Singh's attorney V.K. Anand said.