by Jesse Bering
I find deCatanzaro’s argument that suicide is adaptive both convincing and intriguing. But I do think it begs for more follow-up research. For example, his inclusive fitness logic should apply to every single social species on earth, so why is there such an obvious gap between frequency of suicide in human beings and other animals? Each year, up to twenty million people worldwide attempt to commit suicide, with about a million of these completing the act. That’s a significant minority of deaths—and near deaths—in our species. And there is reason to be suspicious that nonhuman animal models (such as parasitized bumblebees, beached whales, leaping lemmings, and grieving chimpanzees) are good analogues to human suicide. In our own species, suicide usually means deliberately trying to end our psychological existence—or at least this particular psychological existence. And whereas most other accounts of “self-destruction” in the natural world seem to involve some type of interspecies predation or parasitical manipulation, human suicides are more often driven by negative interpersonal appraisals made by other members of our own species. In fact, Robert Poulin, the zoologist who first reported on the altered behavior of those parasitized bumblebees, even urges researchers to use caution in referring to such examples as “suicide”: “The adoption of a more dangerous lifestyle by an insect that is bound to die shortly may be adaptive in terms of inclusive fitness, but no more suicidal than, for instance, an ageing animal taking risks to reproduce in the presence of a predator as its inevitable death approaches.”
I believe that suicide, like fantasy-enabled masturbation, requires evolved social cognitive processes that are relatively unique—in this case, painfully so—to our species. There are anecdotes aplenty, of course, but there are no confirmed cases of suicide in any nonhuman primate species. Although there are certainly instances of self-injurious behaviors, such as excessive self-grooming, these are almost always limited to sad or abnormal social environments such as biomedical laboratories and zoos. Yes, grieving young chimps have been known to starve to death from depression in the wake of their mother’s death, but there is no evidence of direct self-inflicted lethal displays in monkeys and apes. Perhaps Jane Goodall can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but as far as I’m aware, there are no cases in which a chimpanzee has been observed to climb the highest branch it could find—and jump.
I think part of the answer to this cross-species mystery can be found in another theoretical model of suicide, this one by the psychologist Roy Baumeister, which I’ve always viewed as the “proximate” level to deCatanzaro’s “ultimate” level of explanation for suicide. These are not alternative accounts of human suicide but deeply complementary ones. While deCatanzaro explains suicide in terms of evolutionary dynamics, Baumeister zeros in on the specific psychological processes, the subjective lens through which a suicidal person sees the world. His model describes the engine that actively promotes the adaptive response of suicide. I should hasten to add that I don’t think either of them—deCatanzaro or Baumeister—necessarily sees his model as being complementary to the other’s in this way. I don’t even know if either is aware of the other. But this is how the two approaches have always struck me. Baumeister’s take on the subject is, quite honestly, one of the most shockingly insightful I have ever read, in any research literature. In part II of our look at suicide and psychology, we’ll turn our attention to that work.
Being Suicidal: What It Feels Like to Want to Kill Yourself (Part II)
One of the more fascinating psychotic conditions in the medical literature is known as Cotard’s syndrome, a rare disorder, usually recoverable, in which the primary symptom is a “delusion of negation.” According to the researchers David Cohen and Angèle Consoli of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, many patients with Cotard’s syndrome are absolutely convinced, without even the slimmest of doubts, that they are already dead.
Some recent evidence suggests that Cotard’s may occur as a neuropsychiatric side effect in patients taking the drug acyclovir or valacyclovir for herpes and who also have kidney failure. But its origins go back much further than these modern drugs. First described by the French neurologist Jules Cotard in the 1880s, the syndrome is usually accompanied by some other debilitating problem, such as major depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, or general paralysis—not to mention disturbing visages in the mirror. Consider the case of one young woman described by Cohen and Consoli: “The delusion consisted of the patient’s absolute conviction she was already dead and waiting to be buried, that she had no teeth or hair, and that her uterus was malformed.”
Poor thing—that image couldn’t have been very good for her self-esteem. Still, call me strange, but I happen to find a certain appeal in the conviction that one is, though otherwise lucid, nevertheless already dead. Provided there were no uncomfortable symptoms of rigor mortis cramping up my hands, nor delusory devils biting at my feet, how liberating it would be to be able to write like a dead man and without that hobbling, hesitating fear of being unblinkingly honest. Knowing that upon publication I would be tucked safely away in my tomb, I could finally say what’s on my mind. Of course, living one’s life as though it were a suicide note incarnate (yet remember this is precisely what life is, really, and I would advise any thinking person to stroll by a cemetery each day, gaze unto those fields of crumbling headstones filled with chirping crickets, and ponder, illogically so, what these people wish they might have said to the world when it was still possible for them to have done so) is an altogether different thing from the crushing, unbearable weight of an actual suicidal mind dangerously tempted by the promise of permanent quiescence.
In considering people’s motivations for killing themselves, we need to recognize that most suicides are driven by a flash flood of strong emotions, not rational, philosophical thoughts in which the pros and cons are evaluated critically. And, as I mentioned in the previous chapter on the evolutionary biology of suicide, from a psychological-science perspective, I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than the psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article, “Suicide as Escape from Self.” To reiterate, I see Baumeister’s cognitive rubric as the engine of emotions driving deCatanzaro’s biologically adaptive suicidal decision making. There are certainly more recent theoretical models of suicide than Baumeister’s, but none in my opinion are an improvement. The author gives us a uniquely detailed glimpse into the intolerable and relentlessly egocentric tunnel vision that is experienced by a genuinely suicidal person.
According to Baumeister, there are six primary steps in the escape theory, culminating in a probable suicide when all criteria are met. I do hope that having knowledge about the what-it-feels-like phenomenology of “being” suicidal helps people to recognize their own possible symptoms of suicidal ideation and—if indeed this is what’s happening—enables them to somehow derail themselves before it’s too late. Note that it is not at all apparent that those at risk of suicide are always aware that they are in fact suicidal, at least in the earliest cognitive manifestations of suicidal ideation. And if such thinking proceeds unimpeded, then keeping a suicidal person from completing the act may be as futile as encouraging someone at the very peak of sexual excitement to please kindly refrain from having an orgasm, which is itself sometimes referred to as la petite mort (the little death).
So let’s take a journey inside the suicidal mind, at least as it’s seen by Roy Baumeister. You might even come to discover that you’ve actually set foot in this dark psychological space before, perhaps without knowing it at the time.
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Step 1: Falling Short of Standards. Most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. Suicide rates are higher in nations with higher standards of living than in less prosperous nations; higher in U.S. states with a better quality of life; higher in societies that endorse individual freedoms; higher in areas with better weather; in areas with seasonal change, they are higher during the warmer seasons; and they’re higher among college s
tudents who have better grades—and parents with higher expectations.
Baumeister argues that such idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for personal happiness, thereby rendering people more emotionally fragile in response to unexpected setbacks. So, when things get a bit messy, such people, many who appear to have led mostly privileged lives, have a harder time coping with failures. “A large body of evidence,” writes the author, “is consistent with the view that suicide is preceded by events that fall short of high standards and expectations, whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” For example, simply being poor isn’t a risk factor for suicide. But going rather suddenly from relative prosperity to poverty has been strongly linked to suicide. Likewise, being a lifelong single person isn’t a risk factor either, but the transition from marriage to the single state places one at significant risk for suicide. Most suicides that occur in prison and mental hospital settings happen within the first month of confinement, during the initial period of adjustment to loss of freedom. Suicide rates are lowest on Fridays and highest on Mondays; they also drop just before the major holidays and then spike sharply immediately after the holidays. Baumeister interprets these patterns as consistent with the idea that people’s high expectations for weekends and holidays materialize, after the fact, as bitter disappointments.
To summarize this first step in the escape theory, Baumeister tells us that “it is apparently the size of the discrepancy between standards and perceived reality that is crucial for initiating the suicidal process.” It’s the proverbial law of social gravity: the higher you are to start off with, the more painful it’s going to be when you happen to fall flat on your face.
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Step 2: Attributions to Self. It is not just the fall from grace alone that’s going to send you on a suicidal tailspin. It’s also necessary for you to loathe yourself for facing the trouble you find yourself in. Across cultures, “self-blame” or “condemnation of the self” has held constant as a common denominator in suicides. Baumeister’s theory accommodates these data, yet his model emphasizes that the biggest risk factor isn’t chronically low self-esteem per se, but rather a relatively recent demonization of the self in response to the negative turn of events occurring in the previous step. People who have low self-esteem are often misanthropes, he points out, in that while they are indeed self-critical, they are usually just as critical of other people. By contrast, suicidal individuals who engage in negative appraisals of the self seem to suffer the erroneous impression that other people are mostly good while they themselves are bad. Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, inadequacy, exposure, humiliation, or rejection lead suicidal people to dislike themselves in a manner that, essentially, isolates them from from an idealized humanity. The self is seen as being enduringly undesirable; there is no hope for change, and the core self is perceived as being rotten.
This is why adolescents and adults of minority sexual orientations, who grow up gestating in a social womb filled with messages—both implicit and explicit—that they are essentially lesser human beings, are especially vulnerable to suicide. Even though we may consciously reject these personal attributions made by an intolerant society, they have still seeped in.
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Step 3: High Self-Awareness. Most scholars paint the emergence of self-awareness as a milestone achievement for our species. But with it comes the crushing truth of how we, as individuals, stack up to others. “The essence of self-awareness is comparison of self with standards,” writes Baumeister. And, according to his escape theory, it is this ceaseless and unforgiving comparison with a preferred self—perhaps an irrecoverable self from a happier past or a goal self that is now seen as impossible to achieve in light of recent events—fueling suicidal ideation.
These unforgiving and unremitting thoughts in suicidal individuals are actually measurable, at least indirectly, by analyzing the language used in suicide notes. One well-known “suicidologist,” Edwin Shneidman, once wrote, “Our best route to understanding suicide is not through the study of the structure of the brain, nor the study of social statistics, nor the study of mental diseases, but directly through the study of human emotions described in plain English, in the words of the suicidal person.” Personally, I feel a bit like an existential Peeping Tom in reading strangers’ suicide notes, but it’s a long-standing practice in psychological research. Over the past few decades alone, nearly three hundred studies on suicide notes have been published. These cover a broad range of research questions, but because they tend to yield inconsistent findings, they have also painted a confusing picture of the suicidal mind.
This is especially the case when trying to reveal people’s motivations for the act. Some who commit suicide may not even be aware of their own motivations, or at least they may not have been completely honest in their farewell letters to the world. A good example comes from the sociologist Susanne Langer and her colleagues’ report in a 2008 issue of The Sociological Review. The researchers describe how the suicide note written by one young man was rather nondescript, mentioning feelings of loneliness and emptiness as causing his suicide, while, in fact, “his file contained a memo inquiring about the state of an investigation regarding sexual offences the deceased had been accused of in an adjacent jurisdiction.”
The more compelling studies on suicide notes, in my view, are those that use text-analysis programs enabling the investigators to make exact counts of particular kinds of words. Compared with pretend suicide notes written as an exercise and “as though” one were about to kill oneself, real suicide notes are notorious for containing first-person-singular pronouns, a reflection of high self-awareness. And unlike letters written by people facing involuntary death, such as those about to be executed, suicide note writers rarely use inclusive language such as the plural pronouns us and we. When they do mention significant others, suicide note writers usually speak of them as being cut off, distant, separate, not understanding, or opposed. Friends and family, even a loving mother at arm’s length, feel endless oceans away.
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Step 4: Negative Affect. It may seem to go without saying that suicides tend to be preceded by a period of negative emotions, but, again, in Baumeister’s escape model, negative suicidal emotions are experienced as an acute state rather than a prolonged one. “Concluding simply that depression causes suicide and leaving it at that may be inadequate for several reasons,” he writes. “It is abundantly clear that most depressed people do not attempt suicide and that not all suicide attempters are clinically depressed.”
Anxiety—which can be experienced as guilt, self-blame, threat of social exclusion, ostracism, and worry—seems to be a common strand in the majority of suicides. We may very well be the only species for which negative social-evaluative appraisals can lead to shame-induced suicide. The most convincing data from studies with nonhuman animals suggest very strongly that we are the only species on the face of the earth able to take another organism’s perspective in judging the self’s attributes. This is owed to an evolutionary innovation known as theory of mind (literally, theorizing about what someone else is thinking about, including what that person is thinking about you; and, perhaps more important in this case, even what you’re thinking about you) that has been both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it allows us to experience pride, and it’s a curse because it also engenders what I consider to be the uniquely human, uniquely painful emotion of shame. (You’ll also remember this from our earlier discussion on psychodermatology and acne.)
Psychodynamic theorists often postulate that suicidal guilt seeks punishment, and thus suicide is a sort of self-execution. But Baumeister’s theory largely rejects this interpretation; rather, in his model, the appeal of suicide is loss of consciousness, and thus the end of psychological pain being experienced. And since cognitive therapy isn’t easily available—or seen as achievable—by most suicidal
people, that leaves only three ways to escape this painful self-awareness: drugs, sleep, and death. And of these, only death, nature’s great anesthesia, offers a permanent fix.
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Step 5: Cognitive Deconstruction. The fifth step in the escape theory is perhaps the most intriguing, from a psychological perspective, because it illustrates just how distinct and scarily inaccessible the suicidal mind is from that of our everyday cognition. With cognitive deconstruction, a concept originally proposed by the social psychologists Robin Vallacher and Daniel Wegner, the outside world becomes a much simpler affair in our heads—but usually not in a good way.
Cognitive deconstruction is pretty much just what it sounds like. Things are cognitively broken down into increasingly low-level and basic elements. For example, the time perspective of suicidal people changes in a way that makes the present moment seem interminably long; this is because “suicidal people have an aversive or anxious awareness of the recent past (and possibly the future too), from which they seek to escape into a narrow, unemotional focus on the present moment.” In one interesting study, for example, when compared with control groups, suicidal participants significantly overestimated the passage of experimentally controlled intervals of time by a large amount. Baumeister surmises, “Thus suicidal people resemble acutely bored people: The present seems endless and vaguely unpleasant, and whenever one checks the clock, one is surprised at how little time has actually elapsed.”
Evidence also suggests that suicidal individuals have a difficult time thinking about the future—which for those who’d use the threat of hell as a deterrent shows just why this strategy isn’t likely to be very effective. This temporal narrowing, Baumeister believes, is actually a defensive mechanism that helps the person to withdraw cognitively from thinking about past failures and the anxiety of an intolerable, hopeless future.
