Is suicide high-status?

I have thought about suicide before in ways vaguely similar to what you describe. At the time, I thought that everything was okay and that playing around with the thought was something reasonable people did, 'cause hey, it's just a thought experiment, I think about all sorts of things, am I right? Looking back at that time I realized I definitely had depression or something similar. I didn't have thoughts of suicide before the hard times and I don't now, and when I fully realized this I became convinced ("in the gut", not just head knowledge) that thoughts of suicide, rolling it around the tongue as it were, are probably a good sign that the general you should seek help, just like all the literature and internets said the whole time.

Am I generalizing? Maybe you're different, but let me lay out the argument clearly:

• Common professional knowledge says to seek help if you have thoughts of suicide, even if you think it's not something you'd ever do (so much suicide is impulsive!)
• I had thoughts of suicide, and I thought there were good reasons the common professional knowledge didn't apply to me
• Later, after help and recovery, I did not have thoughts of suicide, and thought that my past self really really should have taken thoughts of suicide as a strong signal to seek help, even though my past self thought he had reason to disregard the common professional knowledge

I am not a mental health professional. I have on occasion noticed when my brain has sabotaged me, though, and believing myself such a thinker that thoughts of suicide surely didn't point to any problems? That was my brain sabotaging me.

It's intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don't get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.

1) Negotiation suicide
2) Apoptosis suicide
3) Malfunction suicide

Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or 'cry for help' suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn't get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you'd kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to 'risk' suicide for status at a rate that used to be helpful 100,000 years ago, and not so much now.

Apoptosis suicide is when people sacrifice themselves so that their genes (children/family/tribe/country) can have better chances of propagation via kin selection. Note that these suicides are rarely preceded by any sort of warning and are usually done in very effective, premeditated manners. The prototypical example would be an elderly blind man with health problems choosing to die-with-dignity, and poisoning himself after having a chance to visit his grandkids one last time. Rates of suicide go up with advanced age and go up with disability. Suicide rates dramatically go up with vision impairment, which was a pretty huge hindrance in hunter-gatherer times.

The last type of suicide is just when something goes wrong in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, etc can cause this (eg Cobain). Brain damage is a cause of suicide as well, like in football players and boxers (eg Jr Seau). Bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses also are massive risk factors in suicide, though this may arguably be apoptosis instead. Malfunction suicide could also partially account for some teen suicides, given how wild a ride hormones are.

NB: I'm working off memory of a past LW post that I can't seem to locate now on the evolutionary basis of depression and suicide, which had the actual cites.

Edit: To more directly address your point, it doesn't make sense to "say that you are too good for this game and check-out". This is almost negotiation suicide except you're using a shitty, losing strategy to do so. You only check-out if there's an advantage to be gained. It's effective to credibly threaten to check out if that can secure you more resources with the threat. The only way your brain can credibly threaten is if it's prepared to actually go all the way and some percentage of people go through with it. However, life is a game you can only win if you keep playing.

It depends on the culture -- suicide is definitely not high-status among Catholics. (They're no longer like “if you kill yourself you'll go to hell no matter what” and they no longer refuse to celebrate funerals for people who committed suicide, so it used to be even worse.)

I sometimes have thoughts of suicide. That does not mean I would ever come within a mile of committing the act of suicide. But my brain does simulate it; though I do try to always reduce such thoughts.

But what I have noticed is that 'suicide' is triggered in my mind whenever I think of some embarrassing event, real or imagined. Or an event in which I'm obviously a low-status actor.

(With the qualification that I don't know you or how you think and that I am not a mental health professional) I think it's probably important to tell you that in the mental health world this is called "suicidal ideation" and is a glaring sign of clinical depression. The reason you think these thoughts more when you are embarrassed or feel low-status is more likely that those things make you feel particularly bad about yourself than that you brain is trying to give you a way to improve your status. Imagining loved ones saying nice things about you is probably self-comforting, but not especially accurate as a measure of status.

I really think you should go talk to someone about this.

Artists who die untimely deaths tend to experience surges in popularity, but suicide is, in general, a particularly low status death.

In fact, children (and adults) will often just leave a game they're not very good at and disparage the rest of the players for playing

This behavior overwhelmingly tends to be viewed with derision. The actor might want their action to be interpreted that way, but overwhelmingly it will tend to be read as such a sloppy attempt at preventing status loss as to incur even more loss of status.

Further, after a person is dead, he/she is almost always celebrated (at least for a while) and all their faults are forgotten.

Suicide is usually sufficiently low status that it's one of the few situations in which people can openly criticize the recently deceased without serious risk of status loss.

I was surprised to see the initial spike of downvotes. Stabilizer suggested a model for a not-at-all-uncommon thinking pattern and asked for more information. Whether the model is good is debatable, but the post itself is certainly not below the average quality for Discussion.

I've been going through a bit of suicidal ideation as of late, and I think I can give my take on the issue.

I'd say that we tend to oversimplify the concept of "status" around here. We speak of it as though it were a conscious decision to conform to the, mostly, arbitrary ideas of society at large. I believe that a person can live in a culture that declares an action to be cowardly or otherwise sinful, and yet intuitively believe the action to be honorable under certain situations.

In my experience, the core motivation behind wanting to die (or live) is emotional, not logical. The issues that bother you in depression only seem relevant because of your mood. Happiness in such a situation comes, not from solving those problems, but from deciding they're not that important, which is something that is almost impossible when in the grip of depression. The reason I want to die when I'm depressed one instant is usually not the reason I want to die when I'm depressed the next.

That said, the motivation usually boils down to one of these things: self loathing, shame, insecurity, fear,discomfort, disappointment, a general feeling of wrongness, weariness, a sense of obligation, or existential angst.

Occasionally there won't even be an attempt to justify the incentive at all. I'll just think to myself "Oh, I notice that I want to die and any of the reasons I can think of for wanting that seem kind of arbitrary. On the other hand, the reasons I have for wanting to be alive seem just as arbitrary, so I may as well go with what I feel right now. In any case I'll be more consistent with my arbitrary preferences if I'm dead."

So, as you can see, there's no one impulse driving your thought process towards self destruction. That said, I can definitely say that something akin to status-seeking is often at work when I feel like offing myself. It's internalized to the point that neither I nor society can touch it. It's an ingrained sense of honor that can overrule logic, compassion, and conscious duty. It's not a Machiavellian attempt to manipulate what others think about you, but an inner drive pushing you to salvage what you can of the perceived justification people can have for saying things. It's not what they say that counts, but what they can say.

Earlier today, in fact, I got the distinct feeling that I was not "worthy" of trying to live like other people (total nonsense from a logical standpoint, but that didn't seem to bother me at the time), and that the right thing to do would be to die to make up for my audacity. The fact that I had no consequential reason to care about "worthiness" or the fact that I would only hurt all the people who actually gave enough of a damn to judge the way I live my life made absolutely NO difference to me. It wasn't that I didn't think of these consequences, because I did, but I judged them to be NONIMPORTANT!

The only thing that mattered to me was that people could plausibly reach certain conclusions upon learning of my actions and the expression of these conclusions would be socially permissible. I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like internalizing concern over status to me.

Hendrix wasn't a suicide. DFW got a surge of interest but arguably took a status hit as people wrote about what a terrible person he was.

On the other hand, there's some work that appears to show that suicide attempts not only seem to lead to income increases, but the increase correlates with the riskiness of the method. I don't have a cite handy but I can dig it up if desired.

I see suicide as often a reaction to the pain of a decrease in status, particularly when the status decrease is believe to be permanent.

I'd suggest, however, that much of the pain of the status change is temporary. I've had my own setbacks. The new lower status state is not so fearsome and horrible that it can't be faced. It's refusing to face the change that prolongs the pain. Suicide is a strategy to evade the pain of the evasion of the truth.

If people are interested in this, I would really recommending taking a gander at Emile Durkheim's 'Suicide'. He was one of the first sociologists, and attempted to apply his methodology to what one might think the most private decision: suicide. After noticing that the annual rate of suicide was fairly stable, and varied from group to group, he tried to come up with a sociological explanation for this.

He has three categories of suicide:

• Egoistic: this occurs when people are poorly socially integrated - they feel isolated or lack social roots, This is similar to the type of thing mentioned by commenters who talked about the importance of religion.

• Altruistic: the opposite of egoistic (and far less common) - when value their group so much they are willing to sacrifice themselves for it.

• Anomic: this is the most interesting, and relevant to the original post. He claims that suicide can occur as a reaction to sudden jolting changes, upheaval and disequilibrium. This can happen with a sudden loss or a sudden gain in status/wealth/etc: you get anomic suicides in busts (bankers jumping out of windows) and booms (lottery winners who can't handle their new situation).

Of course there's quite a bit to criticize him about, but it's very interesting stuff.

Do you think this theory has some weight?

I think it does, but it would be fair to also consider a possible alternative explanation, given at a website intended for people who are feeling suicidal: [Suicide] happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. (emphasis mine)

I happen to think that reasons for desiring to commit suicide probably differ between different individuals, and thus each of these theses have some explanatory power.

It seems to me that there are several precisifications of this question.

One, might status-seeking be a motivation of suicide or suicidal ideation? I highly doubt it. Of course, many a suicide (quite possibly the vast majority) is motivated by a desire to escape the painful experience of being low-status, but I don't think the prospect of being posthumously post-status plays any role.

Two, is suicide status-threatening for the bereaved? I'm pretty sure it is perceived that way. It does, after all, signal that the suicide didn't care enough about them, didn't want to "play their game", if you will - in that way, it does seem very analogous to the child leaving the game.

Three, is suicide perceived as high-status on the societal level? It seems like in the case of leaving the game, the status attack it implies usually doesn't go through, but is averted by denouncing the suicide as irrational or immoral or both. Not that the status threat idea is needed to explain this behavior, it's obvious enough why such memes would exist. So on the whole, I think suicide isn't perceived as high status.

Now there are exceptions to this. Cultural conventions may exempt certain groups from the suicide prohibition and even explicitly mark it high-status for them, as in the case of the samurai. I expect that suicide wasn't high-status if committed by a Japenese commoner.

Then there are artists in our culture, for which suicide doesn't seem to be particularly low-status. I suspect that this is because they are, to some extent, granted a special position and seen as not playing society's game anyway.

And then there are some small circles where suicide is considered perfectly respectable or even high-status (this would be the traditional European intellectuals, I suppose), but that kind of local status-reversal happens for all kinds of things in various subcommunities.

What I am saying is that suicide has been associated with high-status.

At the moment I'm not exactly sure about the nature of your claim. What specific predictions would be true if your claim is true? What predictions would be false?

Although I consider suicide courageous, I would consider my own suicide as admitting to low status and failure and thereby lowering my status even further. In order to avoid the further drop in status by committing such an act, I would probably choose to "disappear"... which may be one of the reasons so many people do indeed disappear without a trace.

Likewise, for some, seeking help exacerbates their sense of failure and low status. If status is at the root of suicidal ideation, this could create a barrier for many people to seek help.

This insight was very useful to me. I now understand why I often imagine the end of the world with me as the "last man standing"! Why kill yourself off in your mind when you can kill off everyone else?

Status-hits are some of the most painful events in your life. Thoughts of suicide often emerge when you're feeling down since suicide is a possible escape and will reduce the pain.

But I agree that status also plays a role in the decision to kill yourself. If you really blow your brains out you can credibly signal that you were feeling really low and gain some sympathy and compassion.

Thoughts of suicide are almost certainly not triggered as a way of regaining status unless they're thought of by a person whose culture encourages that course of action, or for some other reason already thought of suicide that way before an actual embarrassment happened. Your subsequent thoughts may be about the status of suicide, and those subsequent thoughts may reinforce the initial thought, but the initial thought being first triggered as a status mechanism seems far-fetched.

Do you feel a sense of pressure, not necessarily of anxiety, when an embarrassment happens?

People get suicidal in response to very bad things, status loss is and tends to accompany very bad things. What else is there to explain?

Do you think this theory has some weight?

Yes.

No.