Our modern newspapers, by supplying all the details of every suicide that occurs, especially if it presents any criminally interesting features or morbidly sentimental accessories, familiarise the mind, particularly of the impressionable young, with the idea of suicide. When troubles come lack of experience in life makes the youthful mind forecast a future of hopeless suffering. Love episodes are responsible for most of the suicides in the young, while sickness and physical ills are the causes in the old. In a certain number of cases, however, domestic quarrels, and especially the infliction of punishment on the young at an age when they are beginning to feel their independence and their right to be delivered from what they are prone to consider restriction, are apt to be followed in the morbidly unstable by thoughts of suicide. The important practical question is the prevention of the fulfilment of the morbid impulse during these impressionable years. Many a young person has been saved from suicide at this time to realise the enormity of the act and to live without any further temptation to its commission for a long lifetime. As a rule the motive for the act is so trivial and often so insensate that it is not difficult to make patients (because patients they truly are) see the folly of their irrational impulse. In order to forestall the putting into action of their impulse it is important that those who are close to the patient should have some realisation of the possibility of its occurrence. There are usually some signs beforehand of the possibility of the crime. Many of these early suicides have distinct tendencies to and stigmata of hebephrenic melancholia. The best known symptoms of this condition are those described by Dr. Peterson, the present president of State Commission of Lunacy of New York in his book on mental diseases. The symptoms noted are extraordinarily rapid and paradoxical changes of disposition. Depressed ideas intrude themselves in the midst of boisterous gaiety, and untimely jocularity in the deepest depression, or at solemn moments. Then there is the paradoxical facial expression, the so-called paramimia, that is, a look of joy and pleasure when really mental depression is present, or a look of depression when joyful sentiments {310} are being expressed. The existence of such rather noticeable peculiarities may lead to the suspicion of mental disequilibration in young people.