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Why do so few humans kill themselves?

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Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#11

Post by Jedd »

pritambaral wrote: post #8
ebbv wrote: post #2

The relationship between depression and suicide with age is just correlation not causation, so it's silly to draw a line there and assume they are connected -- especially since we know depressed people have a higher suicide rate than people without depression. I think this post is an attempt to make an obvious question seem like it has deep or non-obvious answers; but in reality I think the answers are pretty obvious…

The paper does not draw a causation, nor does the article. The paper asks a question, and the article tries to think along the lines of the question and asks some more. ---- > I think the answers are pretty obvious. Most people don't kill themselves because they don't want to. That is a simple conclusion, indeed; and it's not wrong either. The article tries to reason how that conclusion came to be. People who have ha…

> The paper does not draw a causation, nor does the article.

It does draw a conclusion:

  > Indeed, there appears to be a slight elevated risk
  > of suicide in people taking some antidepressants,
  > especially young people. But the effect is tiny. 
  > And some people do think antidepressants relieve 
  > suffering. If depression caused suicide, treating
  > depression should reduce suicide rates, but of
  > course it hasn’t. This could be due to the
  > ineffectiveness of treatment, however.
If depression caused suicide, treating depressing should reduce suicide rates ... BUT ... that assumes we identify and 'rectify' all depression, and that the only cause of suicide is depression, and that the only metric of success for treatment of depression is a reduction in suicide (across the board) ... and if you adopt those three positions then the numbers start to make sense.

'But of course' this isn't the whole story.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#12

Post by libeclipse »

According to the link, around 1 in 100 people commit suicide. It could be argued that this is a rather high number. Certainly any other diseases that achieved this would receive significant attention.

What is interesting however, is how suicide rates haven't changed with other things like medical improvements and improvements to quality of life.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#14

Post by benten10 »

There's this AMAZING scifi story, which I read in 'Writers of The Future' (great series, named after the eminent L Ron. H.). It imagines a future where after a certain age, everyone has a chip planted in them, which makes it possible to kill oneself 'on demand', painlessly, so to speak. It 'naturally selects' away all those who are uhh, more instably minded, and selects for the very very 'stable' minded. I believe the story was about how boring, unimaginative the society had gotten because natural selection had optimized for stability. Great read! You should read it if you haven't. The writer's of the future series is a collection of amazing stories also, and what finally tipped me into the Sciences, despite the somewhat uhh interesting Scientology connection. Anyone remember the name of the story?

This was inspired by @antiquark's comment: >>Probably has something to do with the theory of natural selection.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#16

Post by drzaiusapelord »

>The fact that suicide rates have not changed in response to changes in medical technology and other ways of life is astounding.

Because depression is a disease, its not just feeling blue because something happened to you and as such it probably has has the same distribution since the early days of humanity. Its a disease with no good treatments so we can expect the same mortality rate.

I think handwringing over people having easier lives but still killing themselves is fairly meaningless, and frankly, more than a little shaming. Depression affects people almost randomly. Wealthy people with easy lives kill themselves just as readily as poor people with harder lives. You can't will yourself out of depression because things are easy for you. The disease, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.

I have major depression. Its not caused by some negative life events or my parents not loving me or anything like that. Its clearly something I was born with or rapidly developed when I was just a child. I think its dangerous to talk about depression as not being a disease of the brain and as something that emerges from negative life events. Those things can certainly make it worse, but depression is a disease like any other, not a mood.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#17

Post by uuiiyyokthis »

eximius wrote: post #6
scardine wrote: post #3

The relevant question is "Why so many humans kill themselves?". Because asking the other way around implies suicide is natural, which is a ratter extraordinary claim.

Perhaps. But it is also pedagogically valuable to ask "Why don't more people commit suicide?" We might learn something about the mental defence mechanism the brain employs.

Pedagogy /can/ go off the rails if it places other goals above the elimination of human killing. I know this is self-evident, however there are many hidden killers out there so consider this a billboard.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#18

Post by hasenj »

tribune wrote: post #15

Remember that it's technically a valid evolutionary strategy to live to, say, 25, have a few kids, then off yourself. Suicide before reproduction is all that would be selected against.

Depends on how much your children need you actually. I've read somewhere that part of the reason women lose ability to bear children past around 40 is so they can take care of their grand children because that is usually more important at that point from an evolutionary point of view.

It might have been a mere speculation but it kind of makes sense.

Rather than take the time to bare and raise one child, that time is better spent taking care of your 6 grand children.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#19

Post by mikeash »

While interesting, this article seems to ignore the possibility that most people simply have a very strong desire to live. It assumes that if someone is suffering, and death would end that suffering, then suicide makes sense, and something weird must be going on to make people keep going.

But this really doesn't make sense. The entire concept of suffering exists merely to keep us alive. We experience pain and despair and sadness not because it's some inherent part of being conscious, but because those sensations help us to avoid things which are detrimental to survival. When push comes to shove, the drive to survive is what's fundamental, and that will (usually) override the desire to avoid suffering.

As intelligent, conscious beings, we have the capability to understand when survival is no longer possible, making suffering a waste. Thus we can, sometimes, override our desire to live in the face of terminal illness. But what's weird is not the fact that we don't constantly kill ourselves at the first sign of trouble, what's weird is the fact that we do sometimes kill ourselves when things look completely hopeless. You might as well try to stay alive, after all.

Re: Why do so few humans kill themselves?

#20

Post by jokoon »

Easy answer: because we want to believe life is precious and that you only live once.

Mental health is taboo.

I'm not trying to say that we should let people die, but the living standard has really skyrocketed, meanwhile we still have behaviors and systems that do damage to mental health, and we still disregard those problems.

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