Comparing the Heaven's Gate "Exit Statements" to Traditional Suicide Notes

In 1997, the Heaven's Gate religious group died by mass suicide. Before their deaths, many members left videotaped final messages ("exit statements"), recording a functional equivalent to a suicide note. This study used natural language processing to compare the proportion of emotion keywords present in these statements to a collection of traditional suicide notes to examine whether the psychological state of individuals differs from more traditional cases of suicide.

Heaven's Gate exit statements were transcribed and compared to a collection of traditional suicide notes collected from Leenaars (1988). Text was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 (LIWC-22). Emotion scores between the two groups were compared using Welch's t-test.

Overall, Heaven's Gate exit statements contained significantly fewer emotion keywords than traditional suicide notes. Post hoc analysis likewise found Heaven's Gate exit statements to contain significantly fewer positive emotion words and negative emotion words.

These results suggest Heaven's Gate members had less emotion surrounding dying by suicide than nonmembers. This result demonstrates that cases like Heaven's Gate (i.e., religious and mass suicide events) may not be well represented by prevailing theories of suicide.