Beyond the Search for Suigiston: How Evolution Offers Oxygen for Suicidology

Soper, C. A.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_3

Cited by 4 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…Viewing suicide through an evolutionary psychology lens will not only lend toward stimulating systematic studies in scientific circles, but also to developing measures of suicide prevention to save valuable lives. There is a need to make a paradigm shift in treating suicide as a derangement or a disordered condition ( Soper, 2019b ) to viewing it from the vantage point of evolution as an ever-present danger to human existence ( Soper, 2019a ). Despite developments in social welfare programs across nations resulting in suicide’s adaptive function being apparently dimmed, suicide still continues to exist ( Aubin et al, 2013 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pain-brain theory further elucidates the function of: (a) front-line pain-related and brain-related factors called “fenders” which serve as buffers against suicidal behavior, for example, self-deceptive defenses which maintain an emotional homeostasis and prevents the pain from reaching an extreme intolerability, and (b) last-line factors called “keepers” which work as “reactive, antisuicide, evolved psychological mechanisms,” for example, making sense of the pain or loss of psychomotor energy which might otherwise be needed to attempt any form of self-destructive behavior ( Soper, 2018 , p. 125–245). Together, these proposed conditions, which have been termed by Soper as “suigiston” in the “pain-brain” theory, can determine the likelihood of an individual attempting to take one’s own life ( Soper, 2019b , p. 37).…”

Section: The Evolutionary Understanding Of Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

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Choosing Death Over Survival: A Need to Identify Evolutionary Mechanisms Underlying Human Suicide

Chatterjee

Rai

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The act of killing self contradicts the central purpose of human evolution, that is, survival and propagation of one’s genetic material. Yet, it continues to be one of the leading causes of human death. A handful of theories in the realm of evolutionary psychology have attempted to explain human suicide. The current article analyses the major components of certain prominent viewpoints, namely, Inclusive fitness, Bargaining model, Pain-Brain model, Psychological aposematism, and few other perspectives. The article argues that relatively more weightage has been given to understanding ultimate (the “why”) rather than proximate (the “how”) functionality of suicidal acts. Evolutionary theorists have consistently pointed out that to comprehensively understand a trait or behavior, one needs to delineate not only how it supports survival but also the evolution of the mechanisms underlying the trait or behavior. Existing theories on suicide have primarily focused on its fitness benefits on surviving kin instead of providing evolutionary explanations of the more complex mechanisms leading up to such self-destructive motivations. Thus, the current paper attempts to highlight this gap in theorizing while suggesting probable proximate explanations of suicide which stresses the need to diffuse attention paid to fitness consequences of the act alone. We speculate that such explorations are needed in order to build a robust and comprehensive evolutionary theory of human suicide.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Evolutionary Understanding Of Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

Choosing Death Over Survival: A Need to Identify Evolutionary Mechanisms Underlying Human Suicide

Chatterjee

Rai

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Whether there is in fact a mechanistic link is open to reasonable doubt, not least because of two-way missing specificity (Soper, 2019b). In one direction, IPTS's conditions are not specific to suicide; Joiner and colleagues conceive, for example, that a putative "capability remains protective for some people, including in the midst of suicidal crises, yet it may become a significant danger for others" (Chu et al, 2017(Chu et al, , p. 1333.…”

Section: Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The recurring explanatory deficit translates into a persisting paradigmatic disarray; no theory of suicide's supposed proximal causation is sufficiently convincing to rally a scientific consensus (Soper, 2019b). Since an early offer by Durkheim (1897Durkheim ( /1952, dozens of competing theories have been proposed-many, like IPTS, claiming empirical support (Barzilay-Levkowitz & Apter, 2014; Gunn & Lester, 2014)-but with little if any cumulative progress (Lester, 2019a).…”

Section: Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Signally, through no lack of visibility (Hjelmeland & Knizek, 2019), IPTS has not stemmed the proliferation. Rival formulations-peer-reviewed, published, and by that measure comparably plausibleare provided by Benson et al (2016), Bryan and Rudd (2016) The explanatory gap also reflects in a decades-long empirical failure to identify usefully accurate predictive markers (Soper, 2019b). Despite an exponential growth in research, with increasingly sophisticated techniques and larger-scale surveys, the result, in terms of predicting suicide at the level of the individual, remains a steadfast nil (Paris, 2021).…”

Section: Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

Soper

2022

Omega (Westport)

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Joiner and colleagues’ Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS), a prominent “desire-capability” model of suicide—based on the common-sense idea that people take their own lives because they want to, and can—is critiqued from a biological perspective. Tinbergen’s ethological “four questions” guide the analysis: evolution, survival value, ontogeny, and proximate causation, each addressing a different aspect of biological understanding. Problems for ITS emerge with all four. As a parsimonious solution, the desire-capability hypothesis is reconceived as an ultimate, instead of proximate, mode of explanation. By this light, desire and capability for suicide combined in our species’ ancestral past, thus making suicide a recurrent survival threat, and driving the evolution of special-purpose defensive adaptations. This stance tallies with the pain-brain theory of the evolution of suicide, and with Joiner and colleagues’ own investigation into organismic anti-suicide defenses, which appears to conflict conceptually with IPTS. These defenses’ evolved algorithm may make suicide an intrinsically aleatory phenomenon, opaque to usefully accurate prediction. Positive implications for prevention and research are proposed.

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An Integrated General Theory of Psychopathology and Suicide

Soper

2023

Evolutionary Psychological Science

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This article presents biological meta-theory that is intended to serve as a shared key to progress in psychiatry and suicidology. It argues that diverse forms of psychopathology, widely believed to cause suicide, may instead manifest the organism’s last-ditch efforts to avoid that lethal outcome. The analysis elaborates on the pain-brain theory, which views suicide as a costly by-product of human sapience, with the cost managed by serial lines of evolved anti-suicide defenses. The last of these, emergency interventions that function to block the enacting of suicidal ideas, are hypothesized to display in an array of psychiatric phenomena, including mood disorders, substance and behavioral addictions, and psychoses.The etiology of psychiatric syndromes is explained in three parts. First, psychopathology associates with suicidal ideation because the two outcomes share a causal root: the individual’s experience of chronic psychological pain (psychache), subject to a threshold of intellectual maturation. An evolved system utilizes these inputs to evaluate the risk of suicide and to release commensurately severe countermeasures, which manifest non-specifically as psychopathology. Second, the configuration of symptoms is determined by other aspects of individual differences: reflecting contextual needs, individualized blends of motivational and/or cognitive modifications seek to make lethal escape unnecessary and/or impracticable. Third, psychiatric syndromes can be understood as often-observed, heterogeneous clusters of anti-suicide symptoms, combined with psychache and side effects.The model integrates ultimate and proximate explanation, aligns with the epidemiological record, and yields testable predictions. It offers foundations for advancing research, policy, and clinical practice in suicide prevention and mental health.

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Beyond the Search for Suigiston: How Evolution Offers Oxygen for Suicidology

Cited by 4 publications

References 112 publications

Choosing Death Over Survival: A Need to Identify Evolutionary Mechanisms Underlying Human Suicide

Choosing Death Over Survival: A Need to Identify Evolutionary Mechanisms Underlying Human Suicide

Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

An Integrated General Theory of Psychopathology and Suicide

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