Mental illness is assumed to be a necessary condition for attempting suicide or suicidality, generally. If someone kills themselves, we assume it’s because they were clinically depressed or suffering from another disorder like bipolar, Borderline, or psychosis. Past research actually shows that many people who kill themselves do so in crisis, with no previous signs or symptoms of suicidality or mental illness. Regardless of why you’re suicidal, suicidality is often used as rationale enough to force people into involuntary in-patient treatment wards and coerce psychotropic drug use to prevent suicide and treat its underlying mental illness.
But what if the underlying mental illness has actually been preventing suicide the entire time? This is the paradoxical question being asked by European authors Annie Swanepoel and C.A. Soper in their new article. Published in BJPsych Bulletin’s ‘Against the Stream,’ the authors make an evolutionary case for mental disorders actually keeping us alive rather than killing us. They write:
“The front line [of our mind] tries to stop suicidal thoughts from entering our heads in the first place. It keeps most of us, most of the time, fairly happy, fairly hopeful and able to bounce back from adversities. Some buffers use cultural inputs, such as believing that suicide is against God’s will. Our last-ditch defences are drastic measures for dangerous times. When life becomes so painful for so long that the prospect of ending it all could start to appeal, protections are triggered that seek to block any such thoughts from progressing into lethal action. These safeguards are developmentally scheduled to meet the emergence of the suicide hazard (i.e. from adolescence onwards), and they mobilise in response to chronic psychache. By interfering with normal cognitive and motivational systems, they usually make a fatal suicide attempt difficult and/or unnecessary. These shields are costly, often debilitating, but they are less costly than the terminal alternative.”
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This is absolutely destructive NONSENSE. It’s 100% a speculative theory which totally falls apart logically and experientially, but it is wrong to take this argument on intellectually. One must just point out what it does. It asserts a model of the mind (he should be saying brain here, otherwise it is already based on an abstraction) that tries to protect the organism from thoughts on suicide. But what would the brain be trying to protect besides itself in real life, according to the prejudices of science? The brain is only protecting itself intellectually, and the body chemically and hormonally and in other ways. So you are saying that the brain becomes aware, somehow, of suicidal thoughts trying to enter consciousness (from where if not the brain?), and has repressive and defensive mechanisms to try and stop ITSELF discovering them?? I’m not arguing against your theory, just pointing out that it is too confused, too incoherent, too obviously mere intellectual posturing, intellectual speculation, an activity that destroys and muddies all intelligent debate which must be based first and foremost on FACTS, either scientific or those that have been directly perceived and understood in context. Let’s imagine you are actually trying to convey something true here: you still need to be much more clear about what you are saying, otherwise it is nothing but abstract nonsense. Is this supposed to be a neurological theory – a theory about how the brain is operating – or a psychological theory?
In truth it is just mere intellectual, theoretical speculation bellied by experience the description of which would make all such speculation worthless, and you are not insightful enough to recognize this patent and certain fact, a fact which is damning to all forms of intellectual speculation, especially in psychological matters, or matters pertaining to consciousness, which even science, calling it ‘the hard problem of science’, doesn’t pretend to understand even the first thing about. The East has understood for millenia that conscious phenomena must be perceived directly in order to be understood, but we are such heavily socially conditioned factory farm animals over here in the West, conditioned by authorities and experts, that WE believe it is clever people who find out through speculation and we might be such a clever person. No. I’m afraid you are a very deluded person – everyone is in this society, but you just have not measured the destructive consequences of this seemingly respectable practice.
I know this is true from perception, and if you have adequate perception you’ll recognize it’s truth too. If you don’t see and understand what I’m saying, you would demand intellectual refutations of what he says but that gives too much credit and energy to the worthless and destructive practice of intellectual and theoretical speculation. If we are serious about the facts, the truth, the actual, speculation will never do, and in practice it is too easily and intentionally mixed up with facts to make it sound credible, which is what we see here and in so many other arguments in psychology and evolutionary theory.
Speculation is always worthless from the point of view of truth, but is still profitable for egoistic grifts which include proposing intellectually constructed theories and making them sound evidence based when they clearly are not. This is irresponsible, Mad in America, to make this baseless theory sound like either research or a scientifically credible theory. The theory doesn’t lay it’s hands on anything real at all: it hasn’t gone beyond the realm of concepts, and all real human, social and psychological problems are actualities, i.e. beyond the realm of mere words, mere concepts. Theories like this have not touched reality. They are about practicing one’s cleverness in concocting non-factual arguments, and this is destructive to a serious enquiry into the fundamental problems to which your website is devoted.
To understand what this phenomena that we call mental illness, to understand it’s movement, structure and process, it simply must be perceived and understood directly, not through a distorting lens of socially conditioned concepts, otherwise it is egoistic presumption and excess to speculate about something you’ve never experienced, observed and understood yourself, but only theorized about. All this noise of egoistically beneficial but socially destructive theories confuses public consciousness as surely as it does that in specialized fields and academia, and this noise distorts the picture of the actual true state of human research, making it sound like we understand things so much better then we do. Articles like this and all the academics and writers and journalists and others who peddle theories to make themselves seem important or an expert are irresponsible grifters helping to destroy any hope of exposing with clarity the facts and the illusions of our mental health system. You egoistic grifters drown out the voices of all those who actually care and who actually have bothered to enquire and uncover the facts which is the only real proof that people care. And when you’ve been mangled by the system you care, and can see this egoistic bullshit for what it is. I’m not the only one who calls it out here or elsewhere.
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Put more simply, the only terrain with in what you call ‘mental illnesses’ are known to occur is in consciousness, consciousness being defined as awareness and the various happenings in awareness. Any serious attempt to understand the phenomena must begin with the observation of the primary phenomena in the only terrain it is known to exist, which is within consciousness itself, and then one can discover if there is any intrinsic order, structure and process to the phenomena. This I did, and it’s how I understood and went beyond the psychological conflicts you try and grasp with mere theories. And despite decades of research attempting to find some kind of biological marker related to what we call ‘mental illness’, to find some kind of biological trace or explanation, the search has proven useless, indicating that the biological theoretical explanation proposed was always flawed.
And your neo-Darwinistic explanation therefore has no actual biology or neurology to back it up at all – nothng has been found to help explain feelings and psychological distress biologically. One can correlate affect and hormones and neurology, but no-one has begun to explain the system of affects which form the core of all the psychological conflicts you call ‘mental health’ without any actual concrete facts about what you are referring to when you say this, only theories that have never been proven or even affirmed by science.
And the field of evolutionary theory has really rendered all simplistic neo-Darwinistic interpretations of even biological phenomena too doubtful and too problematised by all the mathematical and biological attempts to corroborate the neo-Darwinistic assumptions scientifically. So this is poor quality work, destructive and useless work. And you must begin to perceive the difference between real investigation, enquiry into the actual, and this speculative or heavily socially conditioned intellectual posturing which is really clever people playing in the sandpit of social concepts, not a serious attempt to observe, penetrate, expose and understand the facts at all, which is the only movement within science and consciousness that has any meaning at all, because whatever you are, whatever reality is, whatever anything is, it’s WHAT ACTUALLY IS, not a mere THEORY ABOUT WHAT IS. Now can we get that into our thick skulls? I’m being serious here. See how stupid we are that we can’t tell the difference between intellectual make-believe and substantial enquiries into the facts, into what actually is. We must all demand better, because Mad in America have never managed to measure how right their critique of psychiatry and society is. If you did measure it you’d lose all your hesitancy and be screaming like me in the high streets, and on TV and radio shows too hopefully. And even though our efforts will not effect social change they will exercise our lungs and brains and hearts and make us worthwhile agents of social destruction.
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Why can’t Darwinism and non-biological psychiatry go hand in hand? Clearly humans are machines, that much is certain – and even if brains do access a field of psyche (as non-material as how the parliament is not tautological to a building), the untold millennia might have invented ways to predispose individuals to certain patterns of thinking. Of course, the complexity of it all makes it impractical to gauge a specific individual’s response to hardship, but certain tendencies do turn up – aren’t cultures ultimately delusional in making up entire realities of spirits and morals? And culture is what explains the world to a creature of the word that man is. I may be doing a disservice to the current article by equating mentally deranged individuals to systems of morality, but it’s not such a leap of faith when they are effectively staving off the most reasonable question as to why bother with an inevitably-doomed game of life. Wordless creatures do not ponder such questions, hence culture might as well have been Nature’s solution – an irrational answer to an irrational problem.
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Everything you are saying is mere theoretical speculation and this is the whole problem. The reason why neo-Darwinist theory should not be used AT ALL in order to try and understand reality includes the fact that the theorized mechanism of random selection by random genetic mutation producing functional novel proteins has never been experimentally or mathematically corroborated and all attempts to do so have only produced serious contradictions with the assumptions behind this proposed mechanism. And in actual fact, the goal of corroborating the theory has run into impossible problems, but unfortunately this has raised the specture of an even more rash theory being proposed which is intelligent design, and even leading scientists are now muddying the debate with this rash theory too. But just look at the actual facts thrown up by the research and you’ll see all the interminable problems with it. This is the actual state of the research.
And if consciousness and emotions are not the product of biological evolution, as you propose, then obviously even more so no neo-Dawinistic theory can be used to explain them because they are not rooted in the biological mechanism. So see how your theoretical speculation clashes always with the known facts, as all theoretical speculation does, and this is the WHOLE PROBLEM. Honestly.
You see I shouldn’t argue with you over this because I reject all theories in the first place. Most intellectuals would think was stupid or woo woo because of this but it replaces confounding conceptual and theoretical illusions with unimpeded and unprejudiced perceptual clarity. One person understand this and see what I see! It’s amazing that we ever got into theory. I want to meditate on the known facts including the scientific facts, and perceive the actual structure, harmony and process within the facts. That perceptual apprehension of the structure, harmony and process within the living world including our own conscious processes is the ultimate aim of all theories anyway, which merely wants to map out reality as it is, and once it has been found, the theory becomes a mere linguistic form to express and refer to and describe this actual perceived fact in what is. I don’t need a theory to prop up my perception or shape and prejudice my enquiries because I don’t waste time trying to grasp reality through mere thought, mere words. I look at the facts and observations and these tell their own intricate story and THAT story is far, far, far more intelligent, true, profound and beautiful then any theory there ever has or will ever be, or any of my socially conditioned words used to describe them. Perception is infinitely more intelligent then the intellect and is the true answer to all human problems. The intellect, on the other hand, is the origin of all human problems and that is something that can only become clear through a journey of perception and understanding of life. The intellect cannot solve the problem if it is the problem. Only freedom, life and perception can, which is us uncontrolled by thought.
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My CPTSD is from childhood abuse. I remember being suicidal at age 8. The depression didn’t start in earnest until my late teens, although I had been melancholy before that. If anything, it felt like the barriers that had been preventing me from taking actual suicidal action had been stripped away when my condition worsened. Now, when I’m not depressed, I have a sense of “lowness” that has taken all the joy out of life. I don’t think mental illness prevented me from doing harm to myself. It has made me more resilient to hardship than most people but paradoxically makes me unable to feel genuine happiness anymore.
I should note I was on an SSRI for 3 years and I had never harmed myself more than in that time period. The only time I started relapsing into that suicidal state was during lockdowns and when I was in a relationship with an abuser.
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“Completed suicides are the near-random residue ”
As the mother of someone who died by suicide I find that comment insulting and disrespectful.
Sam, a “critical suicidologist” uses critical thinking. How can you have safeguards that are developmentally scheduled in a developmental condition like autism? If the “suicide hazard” appears in the teenage years, then why are 10 year olds killing themselves?
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