In suicide victims' farewell letters, the most frequently appearing nouns were family-related expressions such as "mom" and "dad."
The Korea Foundation For Suicide Prevention (KFSP) recently released a report titled "A study on the characteristics of homicide followed by suicide through farewell letter analysis."
The foundation and a research team from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) analyzed cases in which farewell letters were left among 102,538 suicide deaths from 2013 to 2020. Among them, they extracted 209 and 418 cases, respectively, from 215 farewell letters of homicide followed by suicide and 37,735 farewell letters of general suicide, and analyzed them using natural language processing.
The analysis found that in both groups, expressions referring to parents appeared most frequently. In farewell letters of homicide followed by suicide, "mom/mother" appeared 246 times (3.5%), the highest among a total of 7,015 nouns, followed by "dad/father" at 149 times (2.1%). In farewell letters of general suicide, "mom/mother" (522 times, 3.8%) and "dad/father" (414 times, 3.0%) also appeared most often. This included not only expressions directed at one's own parents, but also cases where the writer referred to themselves as "mom" or "dad."
In farewell letters of those who committed homicide followed by suicide, "money" (1.7%) was the third most mentioned term. In contrast, farewell letters of general suicide frequently included words such as "person" (1.7%), "son" (1.6%), "words" (1.6%), and "family" (1.2%).
The researchers also analyzed emotional expressions in the farewell letters using a model of 28 emotion categories. In farewell letters of homicide followed by suicide, "anger," "excitement," and "neutral" appeared relatively more often, while in farewell letters of general suicide, the emotions "consideration," "love," and "sadness" appeared more frequently.
According to the report, in homicide followed by suicide cases where the victim was a child, parents in their 30s to 40s mainly cited economic burdens or the child's health problems as causes. In cases targeting parents, those in their 50s and older cited caregiving burdens and economic difficulties as the primary factors.
The researchers suggested that "to prevent homicide followed by suicide, multifaceted policy support is needed, including an expansion of social security for economic support, an expansion of social services for mediating family conflicts, and greater access to psychological counseling."