From Family to Death: Murder-Suicide Incidents in an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

This article reframes family murder-suicide as a process of family annihilation rather than an isolated crime. It presents a conceptual framework that links strain, shame, and threatened control with family structures, power relations, and stress. The conceptual framework explains how personal despair and coercive dominance converge within intimate partnerships and parent–child ties to produce lethal decisions. This framework accounts for hostile and altruistic patterns across intimate partner and parent–child relationships and highlights key risk periods such as relationship separation among intimate partners and caregiving crises involving children, older adults, and severely ill or dependent family members. The synthesis strengthens family theory on roles, power, and system vulnerability and improves risk prediction through attention to dual harm signals and family context. The framework informs policy, social service design, and multi-agency screening and shows the value of interdisciplinary collaboration for prevention.