Why do people choose suicide? What are people thinking when they are contemplating suicide? What’s happening in their brain, in their mind, in their soul, or their surroundings? What’s going on in their relationship with themselves or others? What’s going on in the different facets of their life? What’s the basis for their decision? How impulsive is it? How much thinking has been put in before its completion?
Suicide has been with us forever and is not likely to go away any time soon. One of the earliest cases was recorded to take place close to 500 BCE. That’s about 25 thousand years ago. Suicide happens for various reasons and to speak about it entails speaking about the reasons underlying it. For example, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles [1], died by suicide around 434 B.C. Under the premise that Death, itself, was a transformation, he decided to throw himself into the Sicilian volcano at Mount Etna.
For our purposes, we will be talking about the type of suicide that is related to its number one cause – depression[2]. Yet, regardless of the underlying reasons, there is also some form of related belief. And while we will not pretend to be able to do away with suicide, such a complicated social phenomenon; we can at least modify and mitigate some of the risk factors, the single most important one being depression. Therefore, throughout this series of articles, when speaking about suicide, we will be speaking about it through the lens of depression. After all, at least 60 to 70 percent of those who died by suicide, had some form of depression. And while suicide has been decreasing in China and India, it has simply been increasing in the United States and several other countries.
Let’s take a closer look. First, we know that everyone who is depressed does not necessarily become suicidal or attempt suicide or die by suicide. But we also know that having a form of depression increases someone’s risk for suicide [3]. Talking about the why of suicide therefore entails talking about the why of depression that leads to suicide.
Having gone through the descriptive aspect of suicide, it is now time to get to its understanding. This then gets us back to the question, “why?” Why does someone with depression decide to die by suicide? And the answer to this is that they don’t know that everything that happens essentially happens for our own best interests.
Let us explain: It all started with the depression. We get depressed because of how we respond to things that happen. We respond to things that happen in a way that gets us depressed because we think we know what things are for and what our own best interests are. Given this faulty belief, we then decide to give meaning through this lens, sorting things out based on what we think is “good,” or “bad.” Yet, as we have previously explained in our articles on Depression, “We don’t know what’s really in our own best interests,” and “we don’t know what things really are for,” though we not only pretend to know or think we know, we may also be totally convinced we do know! This deeply rooted belief has been behind our depression pandemic, hence our suicide pandemic.
This deeply rooted belief is so strong that it will sound bizarre and hard to understand; things happen for our own best interest.
As a clinician, we first ought to learn enough to arrive at this level of insight and awareness. We will then be able to experience that ourselves (clinician heal thyself) and then help guide our patients in the process of the eternal Truth.
If you would like to learn how to do so, please join us on June 11th, for our 6 CEU Full-Day Webinar on Suicide. Come and witness a transformative day in our field. Click here to register and
We will see you then.
Karen and Mardoche
[1] Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Empedocles”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Nov. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Empedocles. Accessed 7 May 2021.
[2] “Depression.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression.
[3] “Suicide and Depression: Connection, Facts, and Statistics.” SAVE, save.org/about-suicide/mental-illness-and-suicide/depression/.