Saw women and children embrace self-immolation to prevent capture after military defeat. These suicides occurred across Hindu Rajput kingdoms in medieval Rajasthan.
In then-British Guiana, the shaman Awakaipu convinced 400 Pemon tribesmen to commit suicide in order to reincarnate themselves as white people.
Saw hundreds of Japanese civilians and Imperial Japanese Army soldiers jump off cliffs, fearing the impending American invasion and brutal capture at the end of World War II.
In Jonestown, Guyana, cult leader Jim Jones ordered over 900 Peoples Temple followers to drink poisoned punch—in a gesture of "revolutionary suicide" to protest worldly wrongs.
Occurred across France, Switzerland, and Canada, wherein 74 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died. Their deaths were driven by the desire to travel to the star Sirius—liberating themselves of the world's oppression.
Witnessed the death of 39 Heaven's Gate Order-members in the US. They believed their deaths meant boarding an extraterrestrial spacecraft following comet Hale–Bopp.
Was orchestrated by the doomsday cult the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God to escape an apocalypse. It resulted in a staggering 778 deaths.
Ten people belonging to the Eckankar sect carried out a mass suicide, in Mauritius, for their spiritual beliefs.
A Bangladeshi family of 9, belonging to the self-formed "Adam's cult," died by throwing themselves under a train. They wanted to live a religion-free life (inspired by Adam and Eve) in isolation.
Saw 11 family members undergo ritualized hanging, in a rare instance of shared psychosis, in Delhi.
In Kenya, 400 people died from self-imposed starvation in mass graves, under the instructions of cult leader, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie.