I'm interested in theories or data from psychology on why this is so. As an example:

Couple caught in ‘financial spiral’ jump to their deaths
A good portion of people are crushed by death (loss of a loved one), bankruptcy (loss of social standing and freedom), or failure in general, sometimes even small failure. Is there an evolutionary psychological theory why this is so? Is there solid data on what happens in the brain during loss? Is it a side effects of minds leveraged for success, and that leverage unwinding? When you think about it, there's no particular obvious reason we should experience loss like we do.

Anyone have good scientific data and/or personal theories?

A reason for putting up some drama?

From an evolutionary perspective, we were very much dependent on the group to survive. A loss of a relationship or a hit to our status could decrease our position among the group, increasing the likelihood of death. Death is associated with chaos. When we get closer to death, we feel more chaotic and insecure which is an evolved survival adaptation.

Change is associated with the possible dissolution of our protective structures that shield us from the unknown. The unknown is correlated with potential chaos.

I'll play devil's advocate and call your explanation too simple.

Those same things make other people stronger. Some people thrive under pressure, attack and after a loss.

While your explanation might certainly be the case for this couple, it's more interesting to know why THIS couple decided to do suicide and other people in the same spot don't.

My theory is that all people have their weak spots. And many people already who decide to kill themselves have a propensity for suicidal behavior. I don't believe in this "perfect life" and tomorrow everything changes. There's always some build up. This couple reached a final trigger and boom, game over.

Kind of with people who are addicted gamblers. If there was no gambling, those people would find another venue/way to get their fix. I'm a big optimist btw, but my "therapy" for those people would be to find a way to funnel their obsession into an environment where they can thrive.

Again, not sure how much of an explanation this is. Hard to falsify, like ehm, most of psychology.

Or we can expand further and ask, how come other animals don't commit suicide? The unconscious response to adversity is purely about survival. However, there is a destructive element to consciousness that presents itself when we confront chaos. Let me break that down:

I already mentioned that death is associated with chaos, but also unconsciousness, falsehood, and disorder. Consciousness is associated with and attracted to life, truth, and order. When we are dealing with continual adversity, we'll often have a conscious realization that something is wrong. This realization is consciousness identifying a lack of life, truth, and order through the presence of the opposite (chaos).

We have the unconscious, survival response to chaos which is erecting structures (physical structures, psychological structures, etc) as a defense against it, and then we have the conscious response to that. It's like our survival instinct saying 'let's stay within these protective structures' and our consciousness saying 'these structures are insufficient since chaos keeps penetrating through'. That is what the destructive element of consciousness is based in. It is the desire to destroy our protective structures, specifically our psychological structures, because they are not good enough.

Our survival instinct does not not want our psychological structures destroyed and is very effective at misdirecting the conscious destructive desire. One way this is done is by trying to keep us unconscious. This is why self consciousness is thought of as an undesireable state. Another tactic it uses is to misdirect our conscious destructive impulse to, at first, the external (blaming others, our circumstances, etc) and as a last defense misdirecting toward our physical selves rather than our psychological structures.

Why would our survival instinct prefer we destroy/kill ourselves rather than destroy our psychological structures? Because from its perspective both lead to chaos/death, but destroying our psychological structures has the added factor of pain. When given a choice between death or prolonged pain+death, it prefers the former.

How come everyone doesn't commit suicide? Either they haven't been exposed to the necessary amounts of chaos (destructive impulse not strong enough) and/or they have prevailed in siding with consciousness rather than unconsciousness when they are confronted by a sufficiently strong enough suicidal impulse.

Craig adding some useful insights ITT.

I may add on the topic of suicide.

Why avoid it?

To rebel against the Absurdity of the human condition and your condition in particular; by being the brave Sisyphus; to live authentically (existentialism).
To cool-headedly and pedantically work toward greater happiness (stoicism).
To develop virtue and set an example (aristotle/virtue ethics).
To have as much fun as possible (hedonism).
To find balance in your life (eastern philosophy broadly).
To live for God (religious philosophy).
To become powerful (Nietzschiean philosophy).
To will less; to imitate life through art and aesthetics (Schopenhauers philosophy).

There are a few I've likely missed here. Choose your game and click Play.

On why are we bad at handling loss?

To lose something you possessed presents a greater threat to your survival than to not gain something that you wanted.

This is why in gambling losses are followed by an increased propensity to take irrational risks, while wins are not.
This is also why loss can lead to grief, while failing to get that 10/10 babe cannot.

It's been said that - you don't sadness until you know loss.

Because they do not rely on something nobody and nothing can take away other than brain health failure ie science and mathematics. You will never be alone, desperate and unwilling to continue exploring if you have that. Ask Planck who lost so many in his life that would make one totally insane from pessimism.

"In March 1887 Planck married Marie Merck (1861–1909), sister of a school fellow, and moved with her into a sublet apartment in Kiel. They had four children: Karl (1888–1916), the twins Emma (1889–1919) and Grete (1889–1917), and Erwin (1893–1945).

After the apartment in Berlin, the Planck family lived in a villa in Berlin-Grunewald, Wangenheimstrasse 21. Several other professors of Berlin University lived nearby, among them theologian Adolf von Harnack, who became a close friend of Planck. Soon the Planck home became a social and cultural center. Numerous well-known scientists, such as Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner were frequent visitors. The tradition of jointly performing music had already been established in the home of Helmholtz.

After several happy years, in July 1909 Marie Planck died, possibly from tuberculosis. In March 1911 Planck married his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin (1882–1948); in December his fifth child Hermann was born.

During the First World War Planck's second son Erwin was taken prisoner by the French in 1914, while his oldest son Karl was killed in action at Verdun. Grete died in 1917 while giving birth to her first child. Her sister died the same way two years later, after having married Grete's widower. Both granddaughters survived and were named after their mothers. Planck endured these losses stoically.

In January 1945, Erwin, to whom he had been particularly close, was sentenced to death by the Nazi Volksgerichtshof because of his participation in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. Erwin was executed on 23 January 1945.[14]."



Sometimes the decision to not be worth it to fight anymore can be a reason. One can be happy having lived and not willing to endure what comes next.

But there has got to be always possible to recover and celebrate the most important thing you have that is wisdom and the future adventures that add to it bringing greater awareness with time. You will always be useful to others. Do not take that away from them.

I'm surprised that you, of all people, haven't immediately brought race into it. Why is it that whites commit suicide at much higher rates than blacks or Hispanics? Why didn't Jews commit suicide at higher rates in the concentration camps? Why did the Japanese commit suicide by bullet at such high rates during WW2?

http://www.sprc.org/racial-ethnic-disparities

Man, in general, has suffered through extremes of disease, war, old age, and so forth and yet he goes on. Some do fall, but the only generalization that can be made is that man is a will laden nobility who carries on through the worst of circumstances.

The cosmos is indeed rife with suffering , and yet the individual man can and does rise above the discomforts of an evanescent loss or defeat.

As an important aside, the suicide who enters life with a karmic debt is still responsible for the same. This makes it difficult for not only him but his karmic connection for it is more like an opportunity lost.

It can be ameliorated but the difficulty increases in the future of the suicide; for this he needs our help and compassion.

With this in mind we should consider the idea of euthanasia and ask whether we are helping the man or placing him into a more extreme position. An illness can be seen as a cleansing for the future development of the man but can still be aided by the doctor and other remedy.

Now, to head into the Jeremiah phase, be aware that aiding or proselyting another into the position and execution of an euthanasia brings one's self into that field of judgment and compensation, better known as karma.

A free lunch is hard to come by, possible, but only through grace.

I assume he's going to pivot to homopobia trolling after a few pages, you gotta be patient and let it play out.

Don't tap the glass.

Don't be surprised if the couple's real reasons for suicide were debilitating medical disorders and associated drug use.

Beer and Beer Brewing improves every year.

Nice snark. I find race boring, and mostly comment on race as pushback against the socially racist nutcases infecting our society who break people into races, and think inequality of outcome necessarily means inequality of opportunity, and use elaborate sophist structures and violence and bullying to support that reality-denying view.

Race as relates to suicide is mostly uninteresting as it's such a tiny percentage of all people. Unlike say intelligence which is a trait of all that has profound effects on entire populations.

Interesting graph though.



A small percentage of white people are more prone to severe depressive disorders?

White people overall are genetically less robust when it comes to dealing with negative events?

White culture is highly individualist, creating rapid economic and technological an scientific progress, but making the fringes feel far more alone, exacerbating depression?

White culture (like Japanese 1940s culture) are more likely to blame themselves than others when things go wrong?

White culture places far higher expectations on the individual for success and self reliance?

White people in the US are far more likely to trust doctors and take/keep taking antidepressant medication, which is causing suicide rates to climb?



Who knows. Not an interesting question since it doesn't relate to other than a small fraction of each population. Not really relevant to OP.

I personally think that race and culture provides an interesting twist, but it's your thread.

So What is your answer to the OP?

What do you think about murder suicides? What evolutionary value do they have?

It's not anybody's thread...it's an open forum. I'm surprised by the race differences in antidepressant meds, for example. Distrust of authority? Less ability to follow through/stick to a plan? More social support and hence less feeling of negativity? Greater internal locus of control, so white people tend to see more of an internal/biological reason (that they falsely believe can be fixed by medication) than Mexicans or blacks? Perhaps the quasi-religious pseudoscience narratives of psychiatry (such as the idea that feeling depressed is low serotonin) simply have more sway in the white community. I'm sure you have other ideas - would be nice to hear them.

And it wasn't so much about suicide as how hard loss hits us and how easily it makes us dysfunctional. I'm really curious as to why.

My working theory is similar to craig's, just in different words - we're fragile creatures who slowly build up complex reward structures in our brians in order to be functional and meet our needs, and the loss of part of that reward structure throws us into chaos. I see the pain of loss as a side effect of very slow learning brains, wired to build positive and safe structures around them, and a mind that bends to allow that.

I'm not so obtuse that I think individual events are specificaly evolved. Generally I hate evolutionary psychology. The brain evolved at a low level and most of the guesses are wrong. IMO the strongest evolutionary effect in improving and shaping human brains, which weirdly isn't talked about much, is likely to be female-child interaction.

But if we're such fragile creatures, then how does that explain how some people can withstand almost anything without jumping to their deaths? I'm actually amazed sometimes that the human race doesn't commit suicide at much higher rates.

I personally think it has a lot to do with culture and religion, which both can either stimulate fear of dying, or the opposite, depending on the "message".

Religion is a permanent positive reward structure built into your brain. It's an eternal, all-powerful, parent type figure that exists no matter what. Naturally this is going to dull pain and dysfunction - your reward structures are simply less affected and less destroyed by worldly events. Religion is like a rat with a push pedal that puts more morphine in its IV.

I don't think religion is much of the answer though for the discrepancy between races. Something else is going on. We'd have to look at a lot more data from different countries and cohorts.

These are interesting statistics :

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20.../#.WaLFKyiGNGN

Actually in the WHO research Japan is somewhere around 20th world wide but the findings are questionable due to cultural issues. Suicides / 100,000:

Lithuania-30.8
South Korea 28.5
Russia 21.8
Japan 19.5
France 15.1
US 13.4
Germany 12.6
Canada 11.3
Britain 7.5
Italy 7.2

I sought the figures for Japan because of my Hollywood history in which the defeated Japanese general commits Hari Kari as an honorable dispatch from life.

This may be a questionable figure, with certainly something lost in translation, but in Japan 59.9 % stated that they want to prevent their children from taking their own lives. Does this mean that the others are OK with it ?

Cultural issues are certainly at play in Japan and perhaps Hollywood got it right ; an honorable death in Japan displays itself, contrary to the western history and cultural tendencies.

By the way, what's with the French ?? The Italians fit and the Brits near the bottom ?

If I was French, I'd kill myself too!

I suspect the Japanese attitude towards honorable suicide has changed since WW2 and the imperial rulers.

Seppuku, an ancient course which continues on in japan, of course transformed, but probably not as compelling as with most ancient happenings.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/histo...l-japan-005822

Interesting! Can you elaborate on this?

if I lost my wife or one of my two daughters(4 and 2(pry irrelevant)) right now in tragedy, how could I not be crushed? Seems natural to me to be pretty crushed/devastated. I would not kill myself (not over one of their losses but god damn, you take all three away from me and there is a chance there will be a fourth corpse and a fifth if someone was responsible for theirs )

As for them people? jump off a balcony when in the dumps financially? that ****'s weak

I heard, in a song today, and in the past, something along the lines of "time is the only healer," seems fair. Your question seems weird. It is only natural to react or feel negatively in regards to loss. If we lose something, that means we once held it/owned it/loved it/valued it/etc and we now lose it. Naturally, devastation, negative feelings, discomfort, sadness, etc will ensue.

You directly mentioned "humans." Seems we are then being compared to what, animals? Do they accept loss better than humans?

This thread seems to be turning into a suicide discussion. In that regard, clearly, the extremity(loss) of the event at hand and even more so the person at hand is to be taken into consideration. Little Jane isn't going to kill herself when she drops a Hot Tomale down the sewer but she might get a little sad. Ol' 54-year-old, malnourished, broke, vodka for breakfast Needlearm who just lost his bestie to suicide may take things a little further than a tear down the cheek like Little Jane did when she dropped her Hot Tamale.

nice post craig

Only one thing relevant to almost all non wartime or terminal life suffering suicides;

The problem with naivete is that ... it doesnt know it.


If they only knew a way out exists, they would not go that way.

Always beware of irreversible choices and the fact incomplete information may lead to them.