In the debates on suicide that emerged from the end of the 19th century (when the suicide rate was also on the rise in Trieste), the causes of suicide were attributed mainly to physical causes on the one hand, and moral causes on the other. The latter were particularly often highlighted by the daily press, which was also criticised for the potential imitative effect that the death notices were supposed to have on the incidence of suicide. If, on the one hand, suicide was perceived as the result of the corrosive effect of modern life and values (e.g. individualism, hedonism, materialism, atheism, etc.), which had challenged the security of the traditional embrace of family and social life, and was the least tolerated form of suicide, it could also be interpreted as the result of physical pathological changes. The paper will observe in which cases suicide was understood as a moral problem (the impact of modernisation, urban life, bourgeois habits, changed values, etc.) and in which cases as a medical problem (f.e. a neurological consequence of a particular mental illness or condition, or other diseases, like pellagra). Although the two aspects were often intertwined, and the boundaries between them could be very blurred, the attitudes towards suicide in each individual case were also largely dependent on the motives and causes, that led to it. Some examples will be given from a psychiatric hospital in Trieste, which can be traced in the diary of A.T., a hospitalised patient who, in the first decade of the 20th century, observed his (male) fellow-patients, some of whom attempted suicide. These notes reveal fragments of their life stories which, at least in part, give insight into personal hardships that statistics could not capture.