pseudocide

plural pseudocides

1. countableuncountableA death, or suicide attempt, that is faked.

   Secondly, the contention that suicide attempts are self-therapy is clarified by introducing the concept pseudocide, with no implication that pseudocides eventually lead to suicides.

   1972 March, Robert L. Hamblin, R. Brooke Jacobsen, “Suicide and Pseudocide: A Reanalysis of Maris’s Data”, in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, volume 13, number 1, page 99

   2 more examples

   Some suspect Lord Lucan of pseudocide after he vanished in 1974 on the night of a murder in the Lucan household. His family, though, are convinced the peer killed himself for real. […] Worse, some pseudocides are not even believed.

   2000 February 14, “Pseudocide: Doing a Reggie Perrin”, in BBC News, archived from the original on 31 Aug 2015

   2005, Philip M. McCarthy, An Assessment of the Range and Usefulness of Lexical Diversity Measures and the Potential of the Measure of Textual, Lexical Diversity (MTLD), PhD dissertation, The University of Memphis. Osgood examined suicide notes and compared them to pseudocide notes predicting that greater motivational levels would lead to more frequent use of high frequency words.

2. countableuncountableSomeone who attempts or commits pseudocide.

   Pseudocides try to escape their existence; the rest of us buckle down and deal with things.

   2009 August 8, Oliver Burkeman, “This column will change your life: Fresh starts”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 16 Jul 2019