Interesting article I just came across

[Hollowman]

New Theory Suggests Mental Disorders May Be Evolutionary Shields Against Suicide

Mental illness is assumed to be a necessary condition for attempting suicide or suicidality, generally. If someone kills themselves, we assume it’s This theory challenges the conventional view of suicidality by proposing that mental disorders may be adaptive responses to psychological distress...

madinamerica.com

 

[NearlyIrrelevantCake]

Most of the article is paywalled.

 

[Alexei_Kirillov]

Interesting, it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility given that the primary symptom of depression is lack of energy. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Adûnâi]

> "But what if the underlying mental illness has actually been preventing suicide the entire time? This is the paradoxical question being asked by European authors Annie Swanepoel and C.A. Soper in their new article."

Why wouldn't it? All culture is various forms of idiotism to mask the underlying futility of this irrational endeavour. People with high IQ will always see through it regardless, because life depends on retarded, animalistic impulse.

I for one would consider the fact that religions and schizos think alike to be an argument for such a hypothesis - both are deranged, both make up a fantastical world full of cope & hope in the face of inevitable death. Stories seem to be necessary for survival - it's as if man got ripped out of the animalistic existence with the invention of language, and had to dumb himself back down.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

Most of the article is paywalled.

I'd suggest just reading the study they linked to instead.


Anyway, I just read through it real quick and I honestly came out of it feeling kind of skeptical. I'm not very convinced on what they are trying to propose...

 

[Adûnâi]

My comment there:

Why can't Darwinism and non-biological psychiatry go hand in hand? Clearly humans are machines, that much is certain - and even if brains do access a field of psyche (as non-material as how the parliament is not tautological to a building), the untold millennia might have invented ways to predispose individuals to certain patterns of thinking. Of course, the complexity of it all makes it impractical to gauge a specific individual's response to hardship, but certain tendencies do turn up - aren't cultures ultimately delusional in making up entire realities of spirits and morals? And culture is what explains the world to a creature of the word that man is. I may be doing a disservice to the current article by equating mentally deranged individuals to systems of morality, but it's not such a leap of faith when they are effectively staving off the most reasonable question as to why bother with an inevitably-doomed game of life. Wordless creatures do not ponder such questions, hence culture might as well have been Nature's solution - an irrational answer to an irrational problem.

 

[Hollowman]

Delusions are necessary for survival.

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

> "But what if the underlying mental illness has actually been preventing suicide the entire time? This is the paradoxical question being asked by European authors Annie Swanepoel and C.A. Soper in their new article."

Why wouldn't it? All culture is various forms of idiotism to mask the underlying futility of this irrational endeavour. People with high IQ will always see through it regardless, because life depends on retarded, animalistic impulse.

I for one would consider the fact that religions and schizos think alike to be an argument for such a hypothesis - both are deranged, both make up a fantastical world full of cope & hope in the face of inevitable death. Stories seem to be necessary for survival - it's as if man got ripped out of the animalistic existence with the invention of language, and had to dumb himself back down.

I thought the exact same things. And if you read the book " A mind so rare" . the author says that the human mind is a hybrid of biology and culture.

Also the book "Sapiens" says culture is fiction so is religion.

The last Messiah by Zapffe touches on this

From the book " A mind so rare"
This book proposes that the human mind is unlike any other on this planet, not because of its biology, which is not qualitatively unique, but because of its ability to generate and assimilate culture. The human mind is thus a "hybrid" product of biology and culture. It is important to realize that I am referring to the mind itself, not merely particular experiences. The human mind cannot come into existence on its own. It is wedded to a collective process, and the very sources of its experience are filtered through culture. The generation of culture is thus a key question in human evolution.
I do not want to suggest, however, that there is a "group mind." Our minds are still very much sealed into their biological containers. But they can do remarkably little on their own. They depend on culture for virtually everything that is unique to the human world, including our basic communicative and thought skills. The word "culture" usually connotes something other than its cognitive aspect. It usually refers to a set of shared habits, languages, or customs that define a population of people. It may be these things, but on a deeper level, any given culture is a gigantic cognitive web, defining and constraining the parameters of memory, knowledge, and thought in its members, both as individuals and as a group. Cultures can differ hugely in their power in this regard. Our cultures are thus our best friends and worst enemies, because we rely on them so completely for many of our most crucial mental powers while at the same time they threaten our intellectual autonomy. They can rob us of the freedom to think certain kinds of thoughts, and even in the most supposedly liberal of cultures, few of our ideas and experiences can really be called our own, so thoroughly have they been washed and filtered through the fine cloth of the culture itself.

 

[permanently tired]

That's a dumb theory imo bc it's been said in some study (can't remember where) the majority of men of commit suicide have a diagnosable mental illness (they call it that not me). If this theory were true, this probably wouldn't be the case and even if it were true in a convoluted way, the "defense mechanism" of being tired doesn't work. Ppl will get fed up of their boredom (at least this is how I feel) and die regardless. A poorly constructed theory

 

[limerance1]

New Theory Suggests Mental Disorders May Be Evolutionary Shields Against Suicide

Mental illness is assumed to be a necessary condition for attempting suicide or suicidality, generally. If someone kills themselves, we assume it’s This theory challenges the conventional view of suicidality by proposing that mental disorders may be adaptive responses to psychological distress...

madinamerica.com

This is a very interesting study. Thank you for sharing. Feelings of depression and lethargy can make it hard to visit the local supermarket or groom oneself, let alone do the elaborate planning and execution needed for a suicide attempt

 

[Gustav Hartmann]

If two things happen simultaneous one cannot know for sure what is the cause and what the effect or whether there is even no effect-cause relationship. Prior to the invention of psychology, psychoanalysis and brain science the poeple had other reasons to kill themselves.

 

[lilah]

i'm not sure what all of that means but it's true that being a chronic pessimist saves you from a lot of deceptions in life.