Sarah Perry-Every Cradle Is a Grave Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide-Nine-Banded Books (2014) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

What Doesn’t Cause Suicide

Some factors are commonly associated with suicide, but have little demonstrable, independent effect on suicide apart from the previously named factors. Depression, for instance, accounts for a very mild increase in suicide risk, mostly in males.72 It would be shocking if there were not some effect, as suicide and suicidal ideation are themselves diagnostic factors in major depressive disorder. But the claim that “the number one cause of suicide is untreated depression,” as asserted in popular sources such as suicide.org and even the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, has no basis in fact. It would be much more accurate to say that maleness is the leading cause of suicide. Depression occurs most often in women and young people; suicide, by contrast, occurs mostly in older people and men.

Some mental illnesses other than depression, however, do drastically increase the risk of suicide. Importantly, while maintaining that mental illness is relevant to suicide, Joiner does not implicate mental illness in causing suicide—rather, his model explains the highly elevated suicide levels in people with disorders like bipolar I and II and borderline personality disorder by the fact that such disorders

(a) facilitate comfort with increasingly lethal self-harm,

(b) increase feelings of (and perhaps actual) burdensomeness, and

(c) decrease the ability to belong.

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