In 1963, Britain experienced 5,714 suicides. Over the next several years, that number declined steadily and quickly; by 1975, the country had 3,693 suicides. This decline took place against a rise in suicides throughout the rest of Europe.
Social scientists started looking for something to explain the drop. What they realized was that the decrease in suicide had coincided with the progressive transition in British households from carbon monoxide-producing coal gas to natural gas, beginning in 1958.
Prior to the switch, 40% of all suicides in Britain were suicides by household gas, a death that was relatively easy, painless, and required little planning. People would just turn the oven on and drift away. When that option was no longer available, fewer people chose to commit suicide overall.
This phenomenon was documented by criminologists Ronald V. Clarke and Patricia Mayhew in a 1988 study titled
“The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications.” Clarke and Mayhew found that, when denied the most convenient means of being able to kill themselves, many people just didn’t bother. “Few of those prevented from using gas appear to have found some other way of killing themselves,” they write in their abstract. “These findings suggest that suicide is an intentional act designed to bring an end to deep, though sometimes transient, despair, chosen when moral restraints against the behavior are weakened, and when the person has ready access to a means of death that is neither too difficult nor repugnant.”
