Suicide by charcoal burning: A digital age phenomenon

Charcoal burning is a method of suicide that has only recently been identified, but now attributes to a significant an ever-increasing number of suicides. Before 2000, this method was relatively unknown and the exact mechanism of death unclear. Media coverage has more recently raised awareness of the phenomenon (Chen et al., 2016). The method involves burning of barbecue charcoal in a confined space, leading to carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning (Chen, Yip, Lee, Gunnell, & Wu, 2015). Charcoal is particularly predisposed to smouldering, which results in less effective combustion and more CO emissions than CO2 (Schmitt, Williams, Woodard, & Harruff, 2011). So recent is the uptake of this method that charcoal burning, that it still lacks a specific code under the International Classification of Diseases 10th Edition (Ji, Hong, Stack, & Lee, 2014).