Autohomicide

Autohomicide is a death caused remotely but carried out by the victim, the individual-scale counterpart of autogenocide. Marsh's framework spells out the mechanism precisely. Every relationship in her model is one of three types: connection, sublation or violation. Connection is balanced. Sublation and violation are unbalanced interactions that deplete one party to enrich the other, and when interactions are unbalanced, energy from the weaker is absorbed by the stronger until the weaker is consumed by, or sublated to, the stronger. The personal membrane is the boundary that holds a person's individuated life and keeps their will their own. Marsh defines a violator as a predator who destroys the personal membrane of another so they can access the released energy, and she is explicit that a membrane can be reached three ways to the same end: gently softened so the two merge, forcibly softened so the weaker is sublated, or simply destroyed. The first sense of autohomicide is what happens when that destruction is carried far enough. Sustained violation and sublation break the membrane, and a person whose membrane is broken can no longer hold their own will against others. They are left vulnerable to coercion by external wills, which can then direct them toward their own death, so the act looks self-chosen while the will behind it was installed from outside. The second sense runs through the negative image, where the law of endoreality assigns all guilt and punishment to the person cast as the opposite of the ideal. Such a person is condemned to carry all guilt and shame for the whole group, and autohomicide in this sense means giving them both the desperation, manufactured by that relentless assignment of blame, and the means to destroy themselves, through self-abuse, risk-taking or suicide. In both senses the hand is the victim's and the cause is the arrangement that produced the despair, which is why Marsh names it a homicide by its instigator.

Suicidology and social psychology study how sustained abuse, isolation, coercion and the targeting of vulnerable people contribute to self-destruction, and law recognises incitement, coercion and duress in a death. Marsh frames these through her own mechanisms, the membrane, the three relationship types, the violator and the negative image, and insists a self-inflicted death engineered from outside is a homicide by its instigator.