In order to predict suicide you'd need real-time data of wide variety of aspects of a human being (levels of pain, hopelessness, connectedness, capability for suicide, etc) in a way that is impossible to achieve at the moment (insufficient measures and insufficient data gathering techniques).
The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
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Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#32Quoted post unavailable.
TL; DR -- You have a chronic pain. No painkillers help. Every doctor you go to doesn't have a quick-fix. People around you keep telling you "you're imagining things", "be spiritual", "it isn't as bad as you think", "it'll go away". Nothing you try seems to help. You wake up every day feeling the pain and it keeps getting worse with no end in sight.
Image living this for even a year (where this is what life looks like for some people for the last 20 years or more) and then tell me you wouldn't say no to "anything to make the pain go away".
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Hear me out.
Let's say you wake up tomorrow with a bit of a headache. You take an aspirin and go about your day.
You wake up tomorrow but it's still there. You visit a doctor who tells you to "take it easy" and you go about your day again.
You wake up the next day and it's still not better. You begrudgingly get out of bed and go about your day. Someone tells you that you seem a bit irritable today. You then try to be aware of it and end up spending considerable mental energy trying to be "sociable". You get back home a bit exhausted.
You wake up and it's worse. Your brain seems to amplify little things up to 100. You spilled some milk and you think the entire day will be like this. You feel "let's stay in today". A friend comes over, you end up exhausted trying to put on a normal face and overthink about how come it looks so easy for your friend to plan a night out today? They invite you and you accept hoping it might help.
You visit the party and you feel a bit okay while in the moment. You go back home and you feel exhausted and sleep.
the next day is even worse. Your brain tells you why bother getting out of bed - it's not like anything nice is going to happen to you today. you fight it and get out of bed but you can't find your slippers - you feel the day is going to be shit again but you go out anyway.
Repeat previous paragraph x 1 year. Now the next day your brain convinces you there's no point in getting out today. You stay in, skip a few meals and it's night. You put on a movie and you enjoy it. Once it's over the feeling comes back. You get frustrated - you pick out some substances to help you "feel less". Maybe this feels a bit better.
You repeat this for a few months.
You are now so irritable and so envious of others that your personal relations start to suffer and you lash out on others. Slowly your circle shrinks.
Now it's easier to not get out of bed.
By now you've had the same day for the last 5 years and you can't see it getting any better. You go to a therapist. If they are good maybe you both figure out some things together that help you conquer small things - like getting multiple slippers one for each room and your brain no longer needs to panick if it can't find the slipper.
But sadly most of the people aren't so lucky.
You try many medications, substances but nothing seems to last. You want a quick fix but there is none to be found (unlike for physical pain). 10 years have gone by with the same morning every day - each a bit worse than the last. Now you think "This isn't going to improve I think. Nobody has answers. There are no solutions. Nothing seems to help. There is no sunshine.".
Your inner voice tells you about a few other things you haven't tried yet. And that's how we lose you.
So forgive me for saying this but people like you who have no empathy and are so willing to invalidate how many people feel on a daily basis don't deserve to be making decisions for others.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#33If suicide can be predicted then I would why not homicide? And then perhaps all crime.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#34In "Why do people die by suicide", Dr Paul Thomlinson goes over the research on predicting suicide.[1]
First, he talks about a well supported model called Joiner's Model, based on research which shows that people who are most likely to commit suicide have all three of these factors:
- Thwarted belongingness ("I am alone")
- Perceived burdensomeness ("I am a burden")
- Ability to commit suicide ("I am not afraid to die")
Perceived burdensomeness has two components: Liability ("My death is worth more than my life to others") and self-hate ("I hate myself")
Thwarted belongingness also has two components: Loneliness ("I feel disconnected from others") and absence of reciprocal care ("I have no one to turn to and I don't support others")
And finally, capability to commit suicide is predicted by: Lowered fear of death, elevated physical pain tolerance, family history of suicide, clustering/exposure to suicidality, combat exposure, suicide attempts, childhood maltreatment
And another model with the acronym "IS PATH WARM" shows that people who are most likely to commit suicide are likely to have, feel or be:
- I = Ideation
- S = Substance Use
- P = Purposelessness
- A = Anxiety
- T = Trapped
- H = Hopelessness
- W = Withdrawal
- A = Anger
- R = Recklessness
- M = Mood Change
[1] - at about 25 minutes in to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arywx88jMXw
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#35The lack of empathy in the comments is scary. No wonder the situation is so bad.
Let me present a scenario which might seem more relatable since it seems people understand physical pain but have no "scale" of what mental pain could be like.
You have a chronic pain (maybe one of wrists is broken in a way that there is no solution). No painkillers help. Every doctor you go to doesn't have a quick-fix. People around you keep telling you "you're imagining things", "be spiritual", "it isn't as bad as you think", "it'll go away". Nothing you try seems to help. You wake up every day feeling the pain and it keeps getting worse with no end in sight.
EDIT: Missed one crucial component. The pain is so much that you cannot have normal social interactions because 80% of your energy is spent trying to cover up the pain. You feel exhausted all the time due to this and don't have the energy or the motivation to do anything.
Image living this for even a year (where this is what life looks like for some people for the last 20 years or more) and then tell me you wouldn't say no to "anything to make the pain go away".
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#36Wrong science fiction reference, it should be The Minority Report.
Would your prediction cause it? avoid it? It was really about to happen? If you are "testing" it, stopping the people that is about to do it would mess with the test? And not stopping them would count as unintentional murder?
My objections are not about suicides, but about predictions in general and predictions that can affect human lives in particular.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#37I feel like the article didn't deliver on its promise. The author never got to try out the device that's supposed to predict suicide. I was most curious about that because I find myself skeptical such a thing could work.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#38Robert Lowell once said that if humans had access to a button that would kill us instantly and painlessly, we would all press it sooner or later. I think this explains suicide better: For most, it’s an irrational act done in the spur of the moment. What I think is more interesting is when suicide is done as a rational act with planning, and consideration for others.
I'm not convinced there's anything rational in suicide by definition. Every organ, vessel, and part of your body, especially your brain, is dedicated to keeping you alive for as long as possible. If it makes you feel the need to end your life, by definition it is not working.
A lot of bad things can happen to you in a lifetime, but death is the worst, without a doubt. To feel the need to inflict it upon yourself is therefore not rational at all, even if it is premeditated. What seems like one irrational spur of the moment decision is really one that in most cases had been considered well before. No one ends their own life before thinking about it beforehand.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#39I like the article for the most part. I've noticed many comments here are lacking the empathy that is so fundamentally needed in this world to help those who suffer alleviate the pain, so as a fellow struggling one I figured I could throw my words to the wind. People more readily mentally visualize somebody without a leg, somebody with open fractures. Not so much for mind stuff, it's not concrete enough to most until…
> People more readily mentally visualize somebody without a leg, somebody with open fractures. Not so much for mind stuff,
> it's not concrete enough to most until it turns physical (i.e. you're a bloodstain on the floor). That's why
> some comments go along the lines of "I can understand suicide for physical pain but not for mental one". I
> would suggest that a broken self hurts more than an open fracture, and lacking certain central abilities to
> stabilize the self leaves you much more legless than if you lost your physical legs.
100% agreed. People have felt physical pain of very wide ranges before so they have some "scale" on which they can measure it. e.g. stubbing toe to a fracture to a chronic pain. But people thankfully don't have similar breadth in the level of mental pain they have experienced. So they cannot imagine a "mental pain" ever being equivalent to getting your leg amputated without anesthesia.
I like how Mike Shinoda talks about it - if you woke up with a bad back tomorrow you might take some rest; if it was worse the next day then you take some painkillers and the next day you might visit a doctor. But we don't think similarly for mental health.
If you are not feeling good you may try to go through the day anyway; next day it's worse so you should think "I should take it easy today"; the next day you might visit the doctor.
Another issue which people cannot seem to understand is that someone not taking mental health seriously and saying things like "you are overthinking", "it's not as bad", "knock it off", "you're a downer" etc end up invalidating the other person's existence (since that's what life is like for them at the moment and people are essentially saying your life isn't real), make them feel like a burden, make them feel that the other person's life is worth more than their own, that they aren't useful and that nobody cares if they didn't exist anymore.
Imagine:
Your leg got crushed and I tell you "it's not that bad", "stop being a baby", "get over it", "you are making a big deal out of this". There is no solution for your leg so it hurts the same every day and I keep saying things like that every day. At some point you'll break. Combine the invalidation with the pain you are already feeling and you'll be like "no one understands me", "there's no one to support me", "i'm a burden" etc and maybe one day you'll be gone.
Re: The undiscovered country: Can suicide be predicted?
#40Just allow people the basic freedom to leave the fuck out of this world if they really want to. But no, that would mean one less entity to milk for labor and money.
Yeah, it's funny how no one gives a flying fuck about your suffering and will actively encourage it for their own benefit right up until you start talking about suicide. Of course, 90% of the time that's because they see an opportunity to sell you on a new drug, religion, or ideology.
Or protect themselves liability-wise, or from guilt.