Suicide as social logic

Kral, Michael J . Suicide & Life - Threatening Behavior ; Washington  Vol. 24, Iss. 3,  (Fall 1994): 245-55.

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ABSTRACT (ABSTRACT)
It is argued that suicide is merely an idea having more in common with societal beliefs and norms regarding issues
such as divorce, politics, sex, abortion, fashion and consumer behavior. Certain individuals are more vulnerable to
incorporate the idea and act of suicide into their concepts of self, based on the same principles by which ideas are
spread throughout society.

ABSTRACT
Although suicide is not viewed as a mental disorder per se, it is viewed by many if not most clinicians, researchers,
and lay people as a real or natural symptom of depression. It is at least most typically seen as the unfortunate,
severe, yet logical end result of a chain of negative self-appraisals, negative events, and hopelessness. Extending
an approach articulated by the early French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in this paper I argue that suicide is merely an
idea, albeit a very bad one, having more in common with societal beliefs and norms regarding such things as
divorce, abortion, sex, politics, consumer behavior, and fashion. I make a sharp contrast between perturbation and
lethality, concepts central to Edwin S. Shneidman's theory of suicide. Evidence supportive of suicide as an idea is
discussed based on what we are learning from the study of history and culture, and about contagion/cluster
phenomena, media/communication, and choice of method. It is suggested that certain individuals are more
vulnerable to incorporate the idea and act of suicide into their concepts of self, based on the same principles by
which ideas are spread throughout society. Just as suicide impacts on society, so does society impact on suicide.

FULL TEXT
Although suicide is not viewed as a mental disorder per se, it is viewed by many if not most clinicians, researchers,
and lay people as a real or natural symptom of depression. It is at least most typically seen as the unfortunate,
severe, yet logical end result of a chain of negative self-appraisals, negative events, and hopelessness. Extending
an approach articulated by the early French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in this paper I argue that suicide is merely an
idea, albeit a very bad one, having more in common with societal beliefs and norms regarding such things as
divorce, abortion, sex, politics, consumer behavior, and fashion. I make a sharp contrast between perturbation and
lethality, concepts central to Edwin S. Shneidman's theory of suicide. Evidence supportive of suicide as an idea is
discussed based on what we are learning from the study of history and culture, and about contagion/cluster
phenomena, media/communication, and choice of method. It is suggested that certain individuals are more
vulnerable to incorporate the idea and act of suicide into their concepts of self, based on the same principles by
which ideas are spread throughout society. Just as suicide impacts on society, so does society impact on suicide.

In this paper I try to convey two main points. The first is that suicide is caused by the idea of suicide and by
nothing else. It is a conscious option to kill oneself made by an individual, almost always to escape from
unbearable psychological pain or, as Shneidman (1993a) has recently put it, from unbearable "psychache." It is not
caused by psychache, depression, anxiety, pain, illness, or biology. It is fueled by them, however; they are among
the strongest motivators ("risk factors") and render a person more vulnerable to the idea of suicide as an option.
The second point is that we will better understand how suicide becomes an acceptable option for an individual or

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group, cohort, or culture by examining and studying the phenomenon of the idea. We need to learn more about how
ideas are adopted more generally in the first place, how they are spread throughout society, and how they change
over time for both groups and individuals. The more we learn about this, the better the position we may be in
regarding our options for suicide prevention and intervention.

SUICIDE AS AN IDEA

The thesis of this paper is an extension of Edwin Shneidman's (1971, 1985) theoretical approach toward suicide.
His is a psychological theory that helps us think about why a particular individual may be at extremely high risk, or
why someone has killed him/herself. Shneidman has identified psychological features of suicide common across
age, time, and culture, which can be summarized into two essential (necessary and sufficient) ingredients:
perturbation and lethality. Perturbation is viewed here as a motivator. It is the degree of upset, despair, agony,
dread, anger, hopelessness, utter misery--psychache--to the point of becoming unbearable; to the point of
exceeding a person's threshold for psychological pain, to the point at which the person decides to do something
about it. There are numerous strategies people typically choose to diminish or end their stress. Some coping
methods are better than others, and some are clearly maladaptive in the long run (e.g., alcohol). Yet the vast
majority of people do not choose to die once they exceed their stress threshold. Exceeding the capacity for
perturbation does not cause suicide. Lethality is the killer. It is the intentionality and singularity of suicide as an
option to end perturbation. It involves selecting the permanent cessation of consciousness as the escape plan. It
is the adoption of suicide as an idea, as a plan of action.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "idea" as both purposeful planning and as an archetype regarding something
quite specific. The former might be referred to as being within one's awareness or at a conscious level, whereas
the latter could be out of one's immediate awareness at a nonconscious or unconscious level. In other words, an
idea can be something you are thinking about right now, or it could be something you've thought about and have
now stored away in the background for future use. Suicide is like this. It becomes an escape plan and ultimately
the escape plan. This may happen before, during, or after a state of perturbation. But perturbation can recede, so
one doesn't necessarily think about committing suicide all the time. Thoughts about it may come and go; at times
they may be strong, at times frightening, and at other times absent. The thought or the plan may become an
archetype outside one's awareness, however, ready and waiting for perturbation to awaken it. It can become "the
house one lives in" but isn't necessarily looking at all the time. We have learned that suicide is not impulsive(1) but
rather premeditated, and often for a long period of time. It is becoming common knowledge that most people who
kill themselves have communicated this idea to others. Consistency and coherence over time is fundamental to
being human (McAdams, 1992), and it is no surprise that this is also one of Shneidman's (1985) common features
of people who commit suicide. Maris (1981, 1991) has described suicidal path-ways or "careers" in which
individuals manifest consistent patterns of responding to states of upset. Previous styles of coping with stress are
highly related to future coping, whether one looks at cognitive styles, emotions, intentions, or behaviors. An idea
once planted may become readily accessible and difficult to replace.

SUICIDE AND PERTURBATION

Few will disagree that suicide must be viewed from a multidisciplinary perspective. Our understanding of the
complexity of suicide can only parallel our understanding of the complexity of human experience. Yet it appears
that we have become entrenched in an implicit, and sometimes explicit, linear causal model of suicide whereby
some weighted combination of risk factors such as depression, agitation, alcoholism, alienation, loss, and
hopelessness (to name but a few) sends individuals beyond their threshold of endurance toward inevitable suicide.
For example, escape from intolerable perturbation is probably the single most common psychological theme

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across various theoretical approaches to suicide since Menninger (1938).

That perturbation-linked risk factors are related to suicide and suicidal thoughts and/or behaviors is well
substantiated. They are not reviewed here in any detail, but their clinical utility cannot be underestimated. In spite
of this increased knowledge of indicators of risk, suicide remains a mystery within this framework. Why do most
people with all these risk factors never kill themselves? Shneidman (1993a, p. 145) has recently written that "[a]ll
our past efforts to relate or correlate suicide with simplistic nonpsychological variables...were (and are) doomed to
miss the mark precisely because they ignore the one variable that centrally relates to suicide, namely, intolerable
psychological pain; in a word, psychache." In the first sentence of that same article he states, quite emphatically,
"Suicide is caused by psychache" (p. 145, original italics). It is my understanding that by psychache Shneidman
means a certain kind of perturbation, one that is deeply personal and has become unbearable. Before we rush out
to set up a linear equation searching for the type(s) of psychache that might cause suicide, however, let us recall
Shneidman's (1985) sagacious statement from which the present article stems: "No one has ever died of elevated
perturbation alone. It is elevated lethality which is dangerous to life. The two concepts need to be separated in
order to have a clear understanding of the total event and the chief protagonist in it" (p. 205). In order to
understand the relationship between perturbation and suicide we need to examine what we mean by the term
"cause," and whether the linear model linking perturbation and related risk factors with suicide is even appropriate.

Maris (1991) has suggested that in our models we "specify both direct and indirect causal paths to suicide" (p. 29).
It is argued here that perturbation can never be more than an indirect cause of suicide. Exceeding one's threshold
of endurance for psychological pain is merely a motivator for action, and suicide need not even enter the range of
acceptable options. In their book Social Causality, Hage and Meeker (1988) argue that not only is the explication of
causal mechanisms necessary if we are concerned with change and prevention, but that in the social sciences
they are different from the natural sciences. These authors believe that causes should be viewed as probabilistic
rather than deterministic, changing over time, and based on reciprocal feedback systems that maintain a social
equilibrium.

Both proximal and distal risk factors for increasing the likelihood (probability) of suicide have been identified, and a
significant portion of the literature is focused on the proximal: near-death risk factors related to loss, interpersonal
stress, psychological states, and biology. It is interesting that in addition to their temporal relation to the suicidal
act, these proximal factors might also be identified as what Geertz (1984) and others have termed "experience-
near" constructs: ones that are readily understood, and close or even accessible to one's imagination and
experience. We have learned much about proximal risk factors, and the subjective experience of perturbation is
central to all of them. Clark and Fawcett (1992) have identified acute short-term risk factors within 1 year of death
that highlight perturbation quite specifically: mood disorder/depression and all its attendant and painful
experiences together with panic attacks, affective liability and possibly even mood cycling, the anxiety-driven
worry experienced when obsessive-compulsive features are present, and what they have termed "severe psychic
anxiety" (see also Fawcett et al., 1987; Rudd, Dahm, &Rajab, 1993). Anxiety comorbid with depression is generally
more debilitating and increases the likelihood of suicidality (e.g., see Brady &Kendall, 1992). Buie and Maltsberger
(1989) provide yet another description of the suicidal state in their concept of aloneness, "a subjective state of
vacant, cold isolation without hope of comfort from within or without; it is accompanied by varying degrees of fear
and horror that may amount to terror. It may be felt in lesser degrees as an agitating sense of disquiet, but
essentially it is akin to the panic of the screaming infant overwhelmed with separation anxiety. It involves to some
degree the sense of dying" (p. 60).

Other risk indices, such as low levels of either a serotonin metabolite, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), or of
homovanillic acid (HVA), a dopamine metabolite, are biological (e.g., Roy, 1990). It is still unclear whether these

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biological variables are related more to acute than to chronic conditions of perturbation. They appear to be, in any
case, linked to proximal and experience-close states of perturbation.

Many distal or "experience-far" risk factors have also been identified, most of them being related to social
categories such as being male, White, Amerindian, elderly, adolescent, gay, alcoholic, or some combination of
these. Looking at these groups, one can ask whether there is a relation between membership in one or more and
the experience of social alienation. Some of these distal factors are concerned with a person's past such as having
a family history of serious conflict, including violence and suicide. The more distal variables, however, are
contextual and change over time and across cultures but provide a background of risk potential for any given
person suspected of being suicidal (Kral &Sakinofsky, in press). The important point about all of these background
factors is that they are likely related primarily to risk for perturbation, and not to suicide per se. To repeat, the role
of perturbation is as motivation toward action rather than toward suicide.

SUICIDE AS SOCIAL LOGIC

Shneidman (1993b) has recently called for a mentalistic approach toward suicide, for an appreciation that the
perturbation behind suicide can be best understood through experience-near mental concepts such as pain,
shame, and despair. He refers to the "interior dialogue" that we should focus our attention on and suggests one
such introspective scenario: "The mind scans its options; the topic of suicide comes up, the mind rejects it, scans
again; there is suicide, it is rejected again, again, and then finally the mind accepts suicide as a solution, then plans
it, and fixes on it as the only answer" (p. 293). Suicide, then, becomes a conscious choice. It is actively played out
in the person's head. Suicide "can occur only when an individual has some conscious mediation or, better, some
conscious intention to stop his or her own life" (Shneidman, 1985, p. 204). The focus here is on thoughts,
intentions, options, and choices, in the context of a very personal experience of the intolerable. Hold on to the word
choice for the remainder of this paper.

Shneidman is not alone in voicing the opinion regarding the need for a new look in suicidology. Baechler (1979)
also suggests that we view suicide as a chosen act, in the sense that one "chooses' one solution from a range of
possible solutions" (p. 19). Efforts to understand why one would choose suicide are beginning to emerge from the
study of cognitive processes in suicidal people, such as the search for problem-solving deficits (Schotte, Coole,
&Payvar, 1990), hopelessness ideation (Beck, Steer, Kovacs, &Garrison, 1985), coping ideation (Kralik &Danforth,
1992), and cognitive rigidity (Bartfai, Winborg, Nordstrom, &Aaberg, 1990). Others have examined various cognitive
models of suicide choice, from personal construct systems (Hughes &Neimeyer, 1990) to attitudinal structure
(Diekstra &Kerkof, 1989; Wallace &Kral, 1994).

The specific idea of suicide is moderated by one's more general attitudes toward it. Research on attitudes toward
suicide is at present becoming focused on several key dimensions, one of them being the acceptability of suicide
as a coping/escape method under certain stressful circumstances (Domino, Moore, Weatlake, &Gibson, 1982;
Rogers &DeShon, 1992). Although suggestions of a relationship between suicide acceptability and suicidal
behavior have been made for some time, the little research that has been done on this topic is highly varied in
definition and methodology, and the findings are conflicting and in the aggregate difficult to interpret (e.g., see
Diekstra, Maris, Platt, Schmidke, &Sonneck, 1989; but first see Meehl, 1986).

There is some evidence from research with youth that certain risk factors are related to viewing suicide more
positively. Bagley and Ramsay (1989) report one of their studies that found young people aged 18-25 to have both
poorer mental health and more accepting attitudes toward suicide than older (>50) people. Biblarz, Bron, Noonan
Biblarz, Pilgrim, &Baldree (1991) found that youth with certain risk factors for perturbation, such as having poor

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relations with parents, viewed suicide more positively following exposure to film media about suicide. Negative
affective states may facilitate the retrieval and association of related constructs, ones that are also negative and
thus fit with one's mood (Forgas, 1992). There is also some evidence that sad people are more strongly influenced
by "strong messages" than are happier people (Breckler, 1993). There is a possibility, then, that perturbation
increases vulnerability to the idea of suicide. None of the above cognitive/attitudinal approaches, however,
address what I believe to be the most fundamental question: Why suicide? The next important question then be
comes, "How does one actually choose that option, that idea?"

We are social animals. Our attitudes about the world, each other, and ourselves are deeply embedded within the
public context of culture (Geertz, 1973), and make up the core of our human identity (Juhasz, 1983). But how do we
come to hold a particular attitude or idea? Social psychology and sociology have long been interested in this
question. An early French sociologist named Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) made a significant impact on directions in
this area in both Europe and America. He wrote several highly influential books, including Les lois de l'imitation
[The Laws of Imitation, 1890], La logique sociale [Social Logic, 1895], and Les lois sociale [Social Laws, 1899],
outlining how ideas are spread within a population. Tarde (1898/1899) believed that individuals repeat similarities
they perceive in their social worlds until these repetitions become a part of literature, art, customs, fashion, fads,
rumors, and even types of criminal behavior. He argued that imitation of normative beliefs is a foundation of
individuals' identities, which in turn strengthens the norm--until those in high-status roles begin new waves of
change that eventually become mores in the same manner. Similar approaches to the relation between culture and
the self as a social equilibrium continue to be presented or pursued (e.g., Fitzgerald, 1993; Gergen, 1991;
Spitulnick, 1993; Tomasello, Kruger, &Ratner, 1983). The structure, sensibility, and acceptability of our ideas and
attitudes are thus based on social logic. They are, to use more modern parlance, socially constructed.

Are we so strongly influenced by our social worlds? Let us look at three examples. First, consider the relation
between private and public attitudes regarding fashion given by social psychologist Genevieve Paicheler (1988), as
she writes, "We happen to wear certain clothes not because we find them aesthetic or suitable, but because they
are in fashion. We feel relieved at no longer having to wear them when the fashion passes, though while it remains
a la mode we cannot imagine wearing anything else. [W]e hesitate to wear certain clothes which please us and
which we find suitable because we judge them 'too much the new fashion.' Several months later, when the fashion
is established, we don them without the slightest apprehension" (pp. 13-14). Consider now an old custom of the
Amerindians of Canada's Northwest coast. The potlatch is and was a ceremony whereby chiefs (in order to
maintain their status as chiefs) or sometimes families host a celebration and feast in which they give away all their
possessions to others in the community. It was, thousands of years ago, a "mechanism for the ambitious person
to rise in the social scale" as well as a means to help distribute wealth and provide food to groups who were needy;
the potlatch was made illegal in Canada in 1884 (Dickason, 1992). On a smaller but no less meaningful scale,
individuals who have attained the high status of a pipe carrier in a community will give that pipe away to another.
In the Amerindian culture all will eventually receive, only to give again. Status and respect are in the giving, not in
the taking or hoarding (recall the bumper sticker that read "He who dies with the most toys, wins"). Finally,
consider the following description written by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in 1950 while in an
American hospital. It was there that he became aware of the cultural influence on how we move our bodies: "A kind
of revelation came to me in the hospital; I was ill in New York. I asked myself where I had seen young ladies
walking like the nurses. I had the time to reflect on it and realized finally that it was at the cinema. On my return to
France I noted, particularly in Paris, the frequency of this walk; the young girls were French but they walked in the
same fashion. In effect the fashion of the American gait, thanks to the cinema, had arrived in our own country. It
was an idea that I could generalize" (cited in Paicheler, 1988, p. 3).

What do fashion, a potlatch, and movements of our bodies have to do with suicide? First, although they may be

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noticed initially, they later all become an accepted part of a particular culture, community, or group to the point
that they are no longer noticed. Hall (1976) has referred to this nonawareness as "the cultural unconscious"; others
might merely call these examples components of a given society at a particular point in time. Second, ideas about
suicide are shaped by the very same processes. The idea and social logic of suicide are its lethality. Let us
examine briefly some lines of social evidence, all highly overlapping.

EVIDENCE FROM MASS MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION

It was once believed that mass media influenced us like a "magic bullet," having the same powerful effect on
everyone. Media scholars now find that this form of public communication can be powerful, but that its effects are
determined by a number of key factors including who the messages come from, the nature of the message, direct
and second-hand communication, and individual differences (e.g., psychological) in the population. Attention has
become focused on the selective influence of ideas from the media culture on certain groups and individuals,
whereby some are more likely to attend to certain messages, to remember them, and to act on them. The media
has now become a part of our socialization, and Tarde's notion of "repetitions of similarities" has been replaced by
similar ones such as modeled behaviors, and the mutually constructed and shared norms that later come to meet
with our expectations (DeFleur &Ball-Rokeach, 1989).

The possible effects of the media on suicide have been hotly debated by those on both sides of the argument. If so
much of who we are and what we do is influenced by media and culture, it makes no sense to think that suicide
should suddenly be exempt. In the film Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen said that life doesn't imitate art, it
imitates bad television. The evidence regarding a media effect on suicide appears to lean consistently on the side
of an effect. Phillips, Carstensen, and Paight (1989) observed a rise in suicide following suicide reports in the
media (e.g., network television news) and reported that there is even a fairly strong correlation (.59) between the
amount of publicity given to stories about suicide and the incidence of single-vehicle motor vehicle fatalities.
Others have shown that these media imitation effects appear to be related to the similarity between the suicide
portrayed in the media and the "new" suicides, and have their strongest alleged influence on 15- to 19-year-old
males (Hafner &Schmidtke, 1989). That the effect is seen most among youth concurs with the identity-forming
suggestibility of this age group. Esman (1990) has even suggested that adolescent behavior may be the most
accurate barometer of culture. Publicized high-profile suicides seem to have a greater impact on the increase in
subsequent suicides (Stack, 1992), and as mentioned earlier the presence of known risk factors may contribute to
certain individuals being more vulnerable to a media effect (Biblarz, et al., 1991).

EVIDENCE FROM CLUSTERS

We have all heard of suicide contagion or "copycat" suicides, particularly among young people. This is when an
unusually high number of suicides occurs within a short time span in a defined setting such as a school or social
group. Recently there has been much publicity in Canada about relatively small northern Inuit communities where
a large number of youth suicides have occurred within a very brief period of time. Members of the Arapahoe and
Shoshone tribes at the Wind River Reservation lived with tragedy when, during a period of 8 months in 1985, 13
people killed themselves (Davidson, 1989). Takahashi (1993) reports from Japan that more than 30 young people
committed suicide in 1986 during the 2 weeks following the suicide of a famous singer, and that the suicide rate
among young people was higher than average for that year. Suicide clusters have also been reported in other small
communities such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, religious sects, and other groups (Gould, Wallerstein,
&Davidson, 1989; Taiminen, Salmenpera, &Lehtinen, 1992).

In their review of the phenomenon of cluster suicides, Gould, Wallenstein, and Davidson (19891 concluded that

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although suicide is determined by many factors, suicide occurring in clusters does indeed exist and youth are at
the highest risk for this. They suggested that "the occurrence of suicides in the community or in the media may
produce a familiarity with and acceptance of the idea of suicide" (p. 26, original italics. The U.S. federal
government has taken this seriously; in 1988 the Centers for Disease Control published a document entitled "CDC
Recommendations for a Community Plan for the Prevention and Containment of Suicide Clusters" (Gould,
Wallenstein, &Davidson, 1989).

EVIDENCE FROM METHOD

The very same process by which the idea of suicide becomes acceptable is responsible for the idea of how suicide
will be carried out. The evidence from research on clusters and media effects is quite strong in this direction.
Setting oneself on fire, drinking antifreeze or malathion, hanging, and shooting have all been described (Davidson,
1989; Gould, Wallenstein, &Davidson, 1989). Many people have travelled far to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in
San Francisco, crossing other bridges (e.g., Bay Bridge) on their way there that would be just as lethal (Davidson,
1989). Choice of method can also be viewed on a larger scale. Anthropologists have long noted differences in
suicide methods across societies, sometimes being quite "stereotyped and distinctive" (La Fontaine, 1975, p. 81).
In Canada, White males shoot themselves and White females die of overdose as the most common methods. In
the U.S., both sexes now commit suicide most frequently with firearms, and access to firearms and other methods
does appear to influence their choice--indeed, there is some evidence that restricting access to firearms may deter
some people from selecting another method (Clarke &Leeter, 1989; Lester &Leenaars, 1993). A classic example of
this is the detoxification of oven gas in England in the 1960s (which had been a very popular method of suicide),
after which the suicide rate in England dropped significantly and stayed at this lower level for some time. Hanging
has been the method of choice in the former Czechoslovakia (Atkinson, 1978), whereas jumping from heights has
been more common in China. Even Humphrey's infamous best-selling book of 1991 on how to kill yourself, in which
he outlined plastic bag self-asphyxiation, appears to have influenced suicides by this particular method among
perturbed people who have but rarely had any form of life-threatening illness (Marzuk et al., 1993). Method is
clearly based on social logic.

EVIDENCE FROM HISTORY

Notions of suicide clusters, contagion, copycats, and so forth, are not new. The most famous example from recent
history is now known as the Werther effect (Phillips, 1974). The tragic hero of Goethe's 18th-century bestseller was
unable, in the end, to be with Lotte, the married woman he was in love with. Sitting at his desk, dressed in his blue
coat, yellow vest, and boots, he "shot himself in the head above the right eye, driving his brains out" (Goethe,
1774/1962, p. 127). The German government apparently banned the book for a time following an "outbreak" of
suicides among young men, many of them copying precisely not only the method but also Werther's manner of
dress (Davidson, 1989). George Howe Colt (1991) has recently described many historical examples of suicide
clusters, for example: suicide "epidemics" in Miletus in ancient Greece, Rouen in 1806, Stuttgart in 1811, Valoris in
1813; men and women jumping off cliffs into the sea to avoid the plague, in England in 665; following a "lottery
mania" in England in 1772; after a popular fictional hero killed himself with a pen-knife, the series of suicides by the
same method that took place in 1822; following an outbreak of smallpox among Central Plains Amerindians in the
1930s; among 70 children in one Moscow school district between 1908 and 1910; 150 drownings in Budapest
resulting in patrols along the Danube. Even Freud's famous meeting on suicide in 1910 Vienna focused on
concerns regarding suggestibility and imitation. Most of us remember the tragic mass suicide and murder at
Jonestown in Guyana, where over 900 people died in 1978, and we may still see global village images in our minds
of David Koresh and the flames of Camp Apocalypse in Waco, Texas.

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TOWARD A MODEL OF MOTIVATION AND CHOICE

Suicide as idea is hardly a novel concept, and few today would argue that suicide is caused entirely by internal
states without external influence in its timing and expression. The major point being made here, however, is that
suicide is a learned choice of action, and that as a specific choice it cannot originate in the head any more than
can the choice of which pair of shoes one will wear, if any. Yet suicide must be understood in the way Shneidman
implores us to, as a phenomenon of the mind. This approach must be extended to both perturbation and lethality.
Perturbation is viewed as a motivation toward action, whereas lethality is the idea of suicide (death) and the
choice to act on it.

Rather than solely conducting experiments to create general laws of the social logic of suicide, we must continue
to construct interpretations that help us understand the meanings of this complex phenomenon (Geertz, 1973).
Rather than solely trying to develop models toward predicting suicidal ideas or acts, we will need to take seriously
Robinson's (1985) uncertainty principle for the social sciences, for which the linear logic of general "covering laws"
has no room. Whether, when, or how a suicidal act will take place can never be certain. Elsewhere, Isaac
Sakinofsky and I have referred to suicide risk as a moving target (Kral &Sakinofsky, in press). If risk means high
estimated probability of the act to occur, the targets of whether-when-how may themselves change for an
individual over time-even over a very short period of time. So whether we wish to understand suicide more
generously, which in itself is a moving target within and across cultures and time, or in relation to a specific
person, we will need to follow Shneidman's dictum and get into the mind.

In suicidology we continue in our multidisicplinary direction. The study of subjectivity, as states of the mind that
include ideas, is already being approached from a multitude of perspectives within the social sciences. Our
methods will need to vary. Fiske and Shweder (1986) note that "those who give primacy to such internal
experience are willing to use subjective methods and ordinary language where necessary in observing and
interpreting these materials" (p. 369). In understanding suicide as an idea, the study of how cultural schemas
become personal schemas is one promising direction (Agar &Hobbs, 1985; D'Andrade, 1992). The investigation of
how previously considered ideas and choices become accessible and are selected under various conditions,
including stress, is another important research area (Gotlib &Cane, 1987; Sinclair, Hoffman, Mark, Martin,
&Pickering, 1994). The study of people with and without risk factors who do not view suicide as an option is also
critical in furthering our knowledge about lethality. Research on resilience, particularly among children and youth,
should be applied to suicide and specifically in the area of resilience to the option of suicide during perturbation
(e.g., see Cowen &Work, 1988; Luthar &Zigler, 1991; Rutter, 1988). It is an exciting time to be in this field. Being
open-minded to the integration of various quantitative and qualitative methodologies within the social, health, and
biological sciences, together with the approaches provided from clinical practice, history, literature, arts, and other
humanities, is suicidology's strength.

SUMMARY

I have suggested that the only direct "cause" of suicide is the idea of suicide and ways to do it, and that in order to
better understand suicide we need to know more about how ideas are spread throughout society and become part
of an individual's repertoire. Lethality is central to the idea of suicide. All the other risk factors, which are almost
always related in some way to perturbation, motivate people toward action when the experience becomes
intolerable and some more vulnerable to incorporate the idea of suicide into their similar designs of self and
choice. These risk factors, which include the dysphoria and perceptual constriction of depression, and possibly
stylistic escape-related defense mechanisms (Kral &Johnson, in preparation), may allow the idea of suicide to "fit"
with other, similar self-categories. Perturbation, although necessary in the typical case in suicidology (other

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motivators might apply to other "types" of suicides), can only ever be an indirect cause of suicide.

I have also presented how we might borrow concepts and findings from research in fields such as anthropology,
communication, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology, and have reviewed briefly some lines of evidence linking
varieties of social logic with suicide. While we have learned much about perturbation, we still know little about
lethality. Our models and methods need to be expanded. Yes, suicide is complex. But it is not outside our grasp or
understanding.

1 People, however, may be impulsive, and some impulsive people will also be suicidal.

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The author is at the University of Windsor.

This paper is based on a presentation to the combined conference of the International Association for Suicide
Prevention, Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, L'association quebecoise de suicidologie, and Suicide-
Action Montreal, held in Montreal in 1993 and The American Association of Suicidology in New York City in 1994.

I would like to thank Jennifer White, Gus Thompson, Bill Balance, Ron Dyck, Antoon Leenaars, Ed Shneidman, Isaac
Sakinofsky, members of the Suicidology Research Group at the University of Windsor, Ron Maris, and three
anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of, or notes related to, this paper, or for
enlightening discussions of the idea presented herein.

Address correspondence to Michael J. Kral, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset,
Windsor, Ontario, N9B 3P4.

DETAILS

Subject: Suicides &suicide attempts; Sociology; Psychology

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MeSH: Depressive Disorder -- diagnosis, Depressive Disorder -- mortality, Depressive
Disorder -- psychology, Humans, Life Change Events, Risk Factors, Suicide --
prevention &control, Suicide -- statistics &numerical data, Logic (major), Social
Conformity (major), Social Values (major), Suicide -- psychology (major)

Publication title: Suicide &Life - Threatening Behavior; Washington

Volume: 24

Issue: 3

Pages: 245-55

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 1994

Publication date: Fall 1994

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Place of publication: Washington

Country of publication: United Kingdom, Washington

Publication subject: Medical Sciences--Psychiatry And Neurology, Psychology

ISSN: 03630234

e-ISSN: 1943278X

CODEN: SLBEDP

Source type: Scholarly Journal

Language of publication: English

Document type: Journal Article

Accession number: 7825197, 02123086

ProQuest document ID: 224898819

Document URL: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/suicide-as-social-

logic/docview/224898819/se-2?accountid=40477

Copyright: Copyright Guilford Publications, Inc. Fall 1994

Last updated: 2018-10-18

Database: ProQuest Central

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