"It’s now believed that around 43 percent of the variability in suicidal behavior among the general population can be explained by genetics, while the remaining 57 percent is attributable to environmental factors....
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, whom we’ll meet again later on, argues that idealistic life conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they create unreasonable standards for personal happiness. When things get a bit messy, people who have led mostly privileged lives—those seen by society as having it made—have a harder time coping with failures...
In the vast majority of cases, people kill themselves because of other people. Social problems—especially, a hypervigilant concern with what others think or will think of us if only they knew what we perceive to be some unpalatable truth—stoke a deadly fire...
We're used to safeguarding ourselves against external threats and preparing for unexpected emergencies. We diligently strap on our seat belts every time we get in a car. We lock our doors before bed. Some of us even carry weapons in case we're attacked by a stranger. Ironic, then, that statistically we're far more likely to perish intentionally by our own hand than to die of causes that are more obviously outside of our control. In fact, historically, suicide has accounted for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined...
I tend to agree with the Austrian scholar Josef Popper-Lynkeus, who remarked in his book The Right to Live and the Duty to Die (1878) that, for him, "the knowledge of always being free to determine when or whether to give up one's life inspires me with the feeling of a new power and gives me a composure comparable to the consciousness of the soldier on the battlefield."
The trouble is, being emotionally fraught with despair can also distort human decision making in ways that undermine a person's ability to decide intelligently "when or whether" to act. Because despite our firm conviction that there's absolutely no escape from that seemingly unsolvable, hopeless situation we may currently find ourselves in, we're often—as I was—dead wrong in retrospect. "Never kill yourself While you are suicidal" was one of Shneidman's favorite maxims...
Acute episodes of suicidal ideation rarely last longer than twenty-four hours...
Back then the classic example of nonhuman suicide wasn’t, say, lemmings or whales (more on those guys soon) but scorpions. As the science historians Edmund Ramsden and Duncan Wilson discuss in their fascinating look into the strangely politicized history surrounding animal suicide, this was largely the result of a popular poem written by the Romantic poet Lord Byron...
Nonsense. That was [C. Lloyd] Morgan's cantankerous view on this romanticized portrayal of the ill-fated scorpion...
Morgan arrived at this conclusion by conducting what remains, as far as I can tell, the only study in the annals of scholarly peer- reviewed history in which a living organism was systematically goaded into killing itself . . . or, at least, given every opportunity to do so, provided it had the intellectual wherewithal. In his article “Suicide of Scorpions,” appearing in the journal Nature in 1883, Morgan reported a series of sadistic laboratory tests, each designed to induce so much pain in these poor arachnids that if they did have the capacity to end their own lives, now would be the perfect time to do so. His torture techniques included such creative methods as “burning phosphorous on the creature’s body,” “placing in burning alcohol,” “treating with a series of electric shocks,” and, of course, “surrounding with fire or red hot embers” (which, contrary to Byron’s poem, merely prompted Morgan’s subjects to walk without hesitation through the fire to make their escape)...
Perhaps a better starting point would have been first determining if scorpions are immune to their own venom, rendering the entire premise of scorpion suicide moot.
Turns out, they are.
Few saw Morgan as a hero for his efforts. In fact, to a new class of progressive thinkers, many of whom were involved in the fledgling animal rights movement in Britain, Morgan was the ultimate killjoy, because unlike his contemporaries at the time, he had no patience for anecdotes and flighty notions of animals being conscious like us...
The pathologists Riazul Imami and Miftah Kemal have estimated that based on records stretching back to 1791, each year over five hundred people lose their lives as the result of an episode of autoeroticism gone bad, the vast majority asphyxiations by ligature or hanging.
Other confounding cases involve those nebulous dream states of the parasomnias. What looks at first glance to be an “obvious” suicide can turn out, upon closer examination, to be a sad incident of “complex sleep-walking.” In 1993 a twenty-one-year-old college student, clad only in his boxer shorts in the tundra-like cold of an early February morning in Iowa, quietly exited his apartment, jumped over some nearby overpass pillars, and started sprinting down the middle of a busy highway. A semitrailer struck and killed him. Initially classified as a suicide, the medical examiner changed the cause of the young man’s death to “accidental death due to sleepwalking” once he learned of the victim’s history of frequent sleepwalking and upon hearing that he’d been sleep-deprived (a known trigger for parasomnias) after several days of cramming for upcoming exams. His college roommate also shared the revealing fact that, just a few weeks earlier, the victim had spoken of having a recurring dream “in which he was running a foot race with someone from a nearby small town.”...
Unless you’re a psychopath, nobody ever had to sit you down as a child and carefully instruct you on how to go about experiencing the crippling emotion of shame, which is a well-known factor in many suicides...
The psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, the “father of psychopaths”—research on, that is—believed true psychopaths rarely, if ever, die by suicide because they lack the interpersonal emotions (and the conscience) necessary to drive them to it...
Mental illness alone
doesn’t cause suicide. Some deeply troubled individuals are perfectly
safe in their delusions. It’s being aware that you’re mentally ill, and
believing judgmental others know this about you too, that makes
mentally ill people so vulnerable to taking their own lives. This helps
us to make sense of that otherwise perplexing clinical finding, known
for some time, that patients who are aware that their delusions are
delusions are ironically at increased risk of killing themselves...
There’s no question that chimps, our closest relatives—and therefore the species we’d expect to find the most behavioral similarities with our own species—lead rich social lives brimming over with emotional turmoil. Yet over the course of what amounts to centuries of meticulous observation by primatologists at hundreds of different sites, on no occasion has a distraught or ostracized ape ever been seen, for example, to climb to the highest branch it could find and jump.
That’s us. We’re the ape that jumps...
Biologists Midori Tanaka and Dennis Kinney put forward an intriguing hypothesis in 2011 suggesting that human beings infected with the [Toxoplasma] gondii parasite are at in- creased risk of suicide. The authors cite the comparatively high suicide rates among individuals such as veterinarians, waitresses, nurses, and farmers, whose jobs place them at greater risk of exposure to T. gondii and other infectious diseases. After controlling for other possible interpretations for the correlation, Tanaka and Kinney suggest that it probably has something to do with the parasite kick-starting mental disorders, such as depression and schizophrenia, among those already predisposed."
--- Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves / Jesse Bering
