Why do people kill themselves?

If you’re reading this because you’re thinking about suicide, please talk to someone first. There is no chance you’re thinking clearly—the hopelessness blinds us to the hope. Let someone try to help you see it. You can find a country-wise list of numbers to call here, or online chat services here.

Not too long ago, I wrote about how we could probably blame many of the burgeoning mental wellbeing issues of the modern world on the fact that life is just getting worse, rather than trying to single out social media or internet culture or whatever. The same is true of our rising suicide rates. But with suicide, I think, we can be a little bit more specific, which will also do the job of highlighting how we can make things better.

Suicide has been a major theme in two of my jobs. As a crisis counsellor, suicide was a core concern. It was the primary ‘crisis’ we were expected to deal with. As a military commander, it was (and remains) a growing and ongoing concern within the ranks of service-personnel, to the point that we were educated on it and instructed to implement programs to address it.

In both cases, it was very clear that there is a point of failure that seems so, so easy to do something about.

¶The two sides of suicide¹

We’ve always had a troubled relationship with suicide. In any given period of history, you can see roughly two perspectives living in tension with one another. The first, that suicide is an affront of some kind, and the second, that suicide is something somehow righteous or noble.

So, in the classical world, some of our favourite stories feature ‘honourable’ suicides, like the auto-executions of Socrates and Seneca, or the suicides of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. But we also find the writings of every major Greek philosopher condemning suicide as an injustice to society—a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

As we move, through the influence of Augustine, towards the Christian-dominated medieval period, we see the tension play out in the doctrinal attitude to suicide: an act contrary to the will of God and the sanctity of life. But for all that sinful condemnation, they were awfully pro-martyrdom.

And then, as secularism began to rise again, into the Enlightenment and onward, we’d see philosophers like Kant reject suicide as an affront to humanity’s moral fabric sitting right next to Romantic accounts of the beauty in the suffering individual, like the titular character of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.

Our attitudes to suicide have always been a tug-of-war between seeing suicide as a violation of our social or moral duty versus a testament to our agency as individuals.

¶Why do people kill themselves

What’s interesting about these two competing attitudes around the act of suicide is that they more-or-less capture the reasons people kill themselves, and that those reasons help us understand the rise in rates today.

Durkheim (pdf), despite over a century since his book on the subject, is still the major thought leader here. Even back then, Durkheim was noticing a rise in rates of suicide. He suspected that as people moved from rural communities to industrial cities, replacing communitarian bonds with the institutions of the state, suicide would occur more frequently—the solutions for our distress that exist in more coherent communities simply don’t exist in the same way. There is something about the cohesion of a society that is vitally important.

Durkheim suggests that we have two broad classes of suicide. On the one hand, there is suicide that happens when someone is poorly integrated into their society. He identified egoistic suicide—when a person feels detached or alienated from their community, with few social ties and thus a lack of meaning—and anomic suicide, when some kind of breakdown in social norms or values leads to a sense of disorientation or detachment with the same kind of effect—a disrupted sense of belonging or purpose. In both of these cases, the lack of societal integration corresponds to a lack of meaning. We might imagine that this leads to despair, but also this means that there is no buffer against despair when people begin despairing. This describes the discharged military vet, or the bereaved family member, or the lifelong company-person who was just made redundant.

On the other hand, Durkeim thought there was the suicide that happened when people are over-regulated or too integrated into society. Here, Durkheim placed the altruistic suicide, where someone sacrifices themselves for the ‘greater good’, and the fatalistic suicide, where someone feels oppressed by the strict norms or constraints that society imposes. Here we have the cult suicides, the military sacrifices, and those who kill themselves because of the so-called ‘shame’ of being raped.

Cutting across the two classes—over-integration and under-integration into society—we have the influence of society on individual emotions: egoistic suicide where society does not restrain the will to die, and fatalistic suicide where society emphasises the will to die. We also have the influence of collective activity: anomic suicide where the activity of a collective fails the individual, and altruistic suicide where the activity of the collective is the reason for the individual’s suicide.

Integration—the meaning a collective holds for us—and regulation—the capacity of a collective to guide or constrain our actions and emotions—are the two primary factors we can see in any suicide we are fortunate enough to have evidence to explain.²

So, just like our historic attitudes around suicide, it’s the role of the community that matters for those who try their hand at it.

¶Why don’t people kill themselves

Not everyone who is over- or under-integrated, or over- or under-regulated kills themselves when they begin to despair though, and this is the central mystery of suicide. Two people may be just as isolated from their communities as each other, or view themselves as equally burdensome to their society, and one might end their life while the other continues to endure.

Today, we like to assume this is essentially the result of disease.³ Those who kill themselves have some kind of psychological or biological pathology that those who don’t kill themselves lack. We do our best to ‘treat’ those who attempt suicide, and that treatment is almost exclusively (psycho)medical in nature.

But this scientistic approach fails to recognise that, despite the role of society in motivating suicide, it isn’t up to society to decide whether a person will or won’t kill themselves. As Camus puts it in the opening paragraphs of The Myth of Sisyphus (pdf):

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards …

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart …

Suicide is fundamentally a question of personal choice—whether in our “attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world”.

It might be that we continue to pathologise suicide; to subject it to scientific analysis and attempt to eliminate it in the methodical increments that our scientific method encourages. But if we only do this, then we’ll continue to emphasise what Camus is worried about:

… man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

The world is full of often unintelligible suffering, and our impulse toward reason only emphasises the fact that this is unreasonable.

¶We are actively eroding the barriers to suicide

Suicide is a personal decision that’s largely culturally enabled. When we find a personal reason to despair, our integration into our communities chiefly decides whether those who are inclined to will try to kill themselves. We might eliminate the gap between those who are inclined, and those who aren’t, by treating suicide as a pathology. But focusing only on pathology eliminates other barriers to suicide.

Jennifer Hecht writes about this quite beautifully:

our culture’s only systematic argument against suicide is about God. This limitation is untenable because even among believers, some believe that God will forgive the act… We have no secular, logical anti-suicide consensus

Her book Stay is an attempt to provide one—that suicide isn’t a ‘permanent solution to a temporary problem’, but actually causes its own problems: it’s hugely destructive to those around those who kill themselves.

But the core of the issue remains. In a world where life is getting worse, isolation is increasingly common, and we turn increasingly to science to solve our problems, and government and corporate institutions to fulfil our needs, frankly, why would we expect suicide to decline? There are more reasons to despair and less buffers against ending our lives. For those so inclined, it might seem that there are more ills in the world than there is attachment to life.

¶Outro (with a heavy dose of hope)

This state of affairs has absolutely no reason to exist. It’s always puzzled me that the increasing inter-connectedness of this world seems to correlate with increasing isolation. A lot of this seems like it’s accidentally imposed by machines of state and corporation—things that are happening with no particular will or malice, but that we blindly accept, and as I often point out, have no reason to. Much of this also seems like an illusion caused by the news from nowhere that our technology encourages. Our information-action ratio is terribly low—we consume much more about things we can do much less about, and we have many more psychic predators as a result.

We have to acknowledge, particularly if we are relying only on secular and scientific values to refute suicide, that for some people it may truly be more difficult to live than to die. But, the state of affairs we have created naturally blinds us to the fact that for far more people who have asked themselves the question, life provides many more reasons to live. This blindness is particularly troubling for those who are in the pit of hopelessness that characterises much of suicidal despair, because in that pit, we are extra-blind. Despair has its own way of hiding reasons to live from us.

So, if you take anything away from this article, it’s that we’ll do much more to change the face of suicide by reaching out to each other than we will be pathologising it, or treating it as a moral failure. It’s much more likely to be a failure of the community than the person. And, in my experience, all it usually takes to strengthen someone’s attachment to the world in the face of their ills is a conversation with someone who can remind them of what they have, without judging them for dealing with Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem”. Just one conversation. It’s the kind of start that could make all the difference.

Again, if you’re reading this because you’re thinking about suicide, please talk to someone first. There is no chance you’re thinking clearly—the hopelessness blinds us to the hope. Let someone try to help you see it. You can find a country-wise list of numbers to call here, or online chat services here.