To quote William Butler Yeats: "Then in 1900, everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth no one went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church or if they did I have forgotten. Victorianism had been defeated."
Suicide rates rose drastically in the 19th century, what do historians speculate to have been the cause? The decline of Christianity? Suicide's prominence in Romantic Art ( Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Wether) or the psychological / sociological effects of industrialization? When did this rise begin? Were suicide rates rising in the 18th century? Was there a overall change in the public view of suicide?
I am by no means an expert on this topic, but it may be useful to research the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his study of suicide in 1897. He tackled the reasons for suicide throughout Europe in the 19th century using statistics from various countries.