Evolutionary Psychology and Suicidology

Gunn, John F.; Malo, P; Soper, C. A.

doi:10.4135/9781529739428.n3

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Suicide might thereby be evolutionarily adaptive. This proposal has drawn interest from some quarters (e.g., Brown et al, 1999;Syme et al, 2016), but it faces considerable empirical and theoretical problems (Bering, 2018;Gunn et al, 2021;Lester, 2014;Soper, 2018). Among these, the burdensomeness hypothesis does not explain specifically suicide; even if someone were such a social liability as to require removal, genetically more logical solutions would take precedence.…”

Section: Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It presents all three necessary and sufficient conditions—variability, heritability, and a differential effect on reproductive fitness (Darwin, 1859)—for natural selection to operate (Soper, 2018). The last of these, suicide’s impact on the propagation of genetic material across generations, is deleterious in the extreme (Gunn, Malo, & Soper, 2021). On this basis, offspring of the less suicidal would be expected to outbreed those of the more suicidal (if, indeed, there are any offspring), thereby pressing the behavior out of the population.…”

Section: Evolutionmentioning

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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Section: Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

Soper

2022

Omega (Westport)

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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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On the Randomness of Suicide

Soper¹,

Ocejo²

2022

Evolutionary Psychiatry

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Evolutionary Psychology and Suicidology

Cited by 3 publications

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Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

An Integrated General Theory of Psychopathology and Suicide

On the Randomness of Suicide

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