ABSTRACT
For thousands of years, people have written about suicide. The early Roman culture accepted and sometimes even recommended mors voluntaris as long as you were a free citizen, i.e. not a slave (De Leo et al., 2006). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, William Shakespeare was probably one of the leading untrained suicidologists and psychologists with a great insight into the human condition. His understanding came from observation and experience and he was able to successfully convey that in his plays such as Hamlet without any formal psychological study.
