1959 Lennard-Jones & Asher in Lancet 30 May 1138 (heading) Why do they do it? A study of pseudocide.

1959 Lennard-Jones & Asher in Lancet 30 May 1140/1 People are described who deliberately harm themselves or take an overdose of tablets without wishing to die. We have termed these actions ‘pseudocide’.

1976 New Society 22 Jan. 147/1 The reason this attempt is called ‘pseudo-cide’ is that it is invariably a gesture and is not meant to succeed—witness the fall in the number of attempts during the junior doctors' strike, when relief was not necessarily at hand.

1999 Independent on Sunday 10 Oct. (Review Suppl.) 11/3 British life insurance companies do not consider pseudocide a major problem.

2000 Observer 18 June (Review section) 2/2 An increasing number of people in America are choosing to commit what in America has long been known as ‘pseudocide’, which means faking your own death so as to exchange one identity for another, an old life for a new.

1970 Hospital Tribune 23 Mar. 22/1 Another characteristic of the pseudocidal persons was found to be ‘their understandable propensity to leave suicide notes’.

1972 Jrnl. Health & Social Behavior 13 103/2 The pseudocidal syndrome is quite unrelated to the suicidal syndrome.

2000 S. Lee & A. Kleinman in E. J. Perry & M. Selden Chinese Soc. (2003) xiii. 293 In more recent years, some psychiatrists have trivialized female suicidal behaviour as ‘manipulative’, ‘hysterical’ or ‘pseudocidal’.

1969 News Jrnl. (Mansfield, Ohio) 4 Dec. 6/4 The following profile of the pseudocide has been worked out: His median age is 33, considerably younger than the 43 that is the median age of the real suicide.

1970 Hospital Tribune 22/2 The typical pseudocide is remarkably different from the usual picture associated with actual suicidal persons.

1970 Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio) 27 Apr. b8/3 Scholars are investigating the phenomenon of ‘pseudocides’ who leave notes but don't jump.