An Introduction to Suicide

It's World Suicide Prevention Day. This morning, a high school student went out with a self-inflicted gunshot, which sent ripples through the city. It's clear that we have to talk about this, but you can't slay your enemy if you don't understand it, so I'm going to help you understand a bit of what it's about. It's still a taboo subject in most places, and it's uncomfortable to talk about because it implies suffering, which we don't like to deal with. That's all right, that's instinct, but you're going to have to forego that instinct for a little while.

Let's talk numbers first. I'm going to refer to the statistics on suicide in the United States, but note that this will vary per country. The rate is 13.32 per 100,000 individuals, which gives 123 suicides per day, of which 51% are done with firearms. men die by suicide 3.53 times more than women, with white males being 70% of total suicides, and with the highest rate being those in their middle age. If we look at the numbers in Mexico, we'll see that around 80% of suicides are men, which makes a greater ratio between man and women than in the U.S. Keep in mind that women attempt suicide more, but they tend to use weaker methods like pills, while men typically use more efficient methods which get the job done.

The great question is: Why? Why do something as irrational as suicide, something which goes against one of the pillars of our existence: The will to live? We're meant to do our best to survive, after all, so wouldn't this be the very last thing that we'd try to do next to literally anything?

We like to explain things that are hard to feel empathy for by separating ourselves mentally. Nobody likes to think that they have mental issues of any sort, so they'll be quick to say that suicide is almost exclusively a mental health problem. It's the same sort of logic that makes you think the Nazis were beasts who couldn't possibly be human when the truth is that under the right circumstances, you could've done the same. What Carl Jung called the shadow self is uncomfortable to face, especially if it's comprised of mainly your negative aspects. Would you admit yourself a beast, or prone to suicide if you were troubled in some manner?

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” Victor Frankl 

Currently, there's a popular sort of meme which goes into depression. You go into Twitter, and it looks like half of the population wants to have sex and half the population wants to die. There are different degrees of suicidal thought that range from passive to active, with the most passive being something along the veins of "I'd rather be dead" to the more active being "I'm going to kill myself at 'x' place and 'y' time", with memes about depression being passive, just not the bare minimum.

Keep in mind that most people aren't actively looking to die, but developing an indifference to staying alive. 

Sometimes you're poking fun at yourself, and sometimes it's a cry for help. Part of it is the fact that it's becoming more socially acceptable to express your grief, part of it is a coping mechanism, and the truth is that humor is what gets a lot of taboo subjects into the public spotlight in the first place.

There's also the social reality to consider. It's a common situation now that people make less money than their parents, sometimes by a wide margin, and what seemed to be the American Dream is slowly slipping away.

Picture this: You're not reading like a rockstar, but you've got family, friends, a nice enough job, you make enough to live comfortably. You're waiting for the next season of your favorite show, or maybe the second part of Infinity War, there's music you like, books you enjoy, all in all, you're living in a relatively good situation. Then you find out that you get a terminal illness that won't be noticeable to you at all regarding physical symptoms, and that you don't really have any way to fight it, and the truth is that you're not really affected by the news. That's the mental state that you'll find a lot of people in.

Maybe you'd think that person's missing love. So, what, he or she goes to a bar, festival or whatever, and find a life partner there? Maybe on tinder? Maybe travel and find someone abroad? It's not exactly easy, and for most men, overrepresented in the statistics, about 80% of them, any sort of chance at love would be a blessing, and it wouldn't be optimal.

Maybe we look to the future, but what do we see? A planet that's been ravaged by humanity for the last century? In my city, we get to see our mountains bombed for making cement, and we have to live in a nearly consistent dust cloud, and the guys who pocket the money get to see their children develop leukemia and other diseases. Maybe it'll eventually be worth it on a personal level, but all we've got for a crystal ball is a shitty present that was sold to us as a bright future.

If the point of living is "just to live", then is that really a point? Jordan Peterson, one of the most intelligent people, recently come upon the public scene with the strength of a typhoon, speaks a lot about the purpose of life, which can be summarized as "find the heaviest cross you can find, and bear it". This can explain why you'll see suicide as a more common problem in the developed countries, as the third world usually doesn't have time to ruminate on their mental health issues and, rather, has to focus on actually surviving.

The feeling of rather being dead, which can easily escalate into "I'll kill myself like this at this time", grows common as people come to be more isolated from the rest of society. If you can't find your place, and if you feel as more of a burden, an annoyance, than a boon, then you'll inevitably try to change that, whatever the cost may be, without considering the possibility that you indeed are loved by others who, at the very least, don't mind having you around, and would more than likely be devastated were you to leave them in any way, shape or form, especially through the permanent path of death.

What do people have to look forward to? If you're young, it's usually something akin to "at least forty more years of hard work", and all the time you'll probably feel something is missing. God is dead, but what substitutes him? The state? Corporations? What's left but powerlessness and dread? Why do you think escapism is so popular? Why the post-apocalyptic genre is seeing a revival, not as a fear of some Cold War rivalry, but as wishful thinking?

Even the present is a shitshow, especially with the advent of social media meaning that you're going to end up comparing yourself with everybody else's highlight reel, and the "Fear of missing out" will hit you like a freight train, with the unfortunate reality that you will end up missing out on some things because you're not a god, you can't be omnipresent.

If you can understand the mentality behind the last few paragraphs, then you can take the first steps to solve the problem. There's a whole slew of other problems, be it economic, social, romantic, what have you, that will contribute to a person's indifference to living or active death wish, and it'll take a systemic change to get rid of all that baggage, which means that it's more likely than not that this either takes a long time or doesn't get solved at all. I'm not here to tell you what to do; there's already a lot of good literature on it. I'm also not here to preach about the nature of suicide as a psychological or sociological phenomenon, but I do hope that reading this gave you a bit of insight into the mentality of the majority of those suffering from suicidal thoughts. Understanding the problem is the first step to solving it.

Further reading:

U.S. suicide statistics

Mexico suicide statistics

Jordan Peterson on fighting depression