Understanding the neural basis of survival instinct vs. suicidal behavior: a key to decode the biological enigma of human suicidal behavior

Nishanth, M. J.; Jha, Shanker

doi:10.1007/s00406-021-01269-5

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Human intelligence likely evolved as a powerful social tool, enabling the organism to read the minds of similarly smart conspecifics, and thereby compete for status, mates, and other resources in complex social settings (Humphrey, 1976). The human brain is so promiscuously imaginative that it can, and at times does, represent self-induced death as a way to obey pain's demand for escape, thereby opening the door to this effective, but dysgenic, response to aversive affect (Murray & Kluckhohn, 1948). Given both motivation and means, suicide is not merely possible: it is expectable.…”

Section: Survival Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A "survival instinct" is explanatively empty (Chandler & Proulx, 2006), unevolvable (Soper, 2019b), and, being a saw of pre-Darwinian "folk" biology (Joiner, 2010), questionably germane to a 21st-century scientific enquiry. Yet it features as a foundational tenet of IPTS (Joiner, 2005;Joiner et al, 2009;Stanley et al, 2016) and is invoked matter-of-factly elsewhere (e.g., Bering, 2018, p. 112;Hooley et al, 2020, p. 101;Nishanth & Jha, 2021;Nock et al, 2019, p. 258;O'Connor, 2021, p. 80;Zalsman, 2021, p. IX).…”

Section: Desire-capability As An Ultimate Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

Soper

2022

Omega (Westport)

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Joiner and colleagues’ Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS), a prominent “desire-capability” model of suicide—based on the common-sense idea that people take their own lives because they want to, and can—is critiqued from a biological perspective. Tinbergen’s ethological “four questions” guide the analysis: evolution, survival value, ontogeny, and proximate causation, each addressing a different aspect of biological understanding. Problems for ITS emerge with all four. As a parsimonious solution, the desire-capability hypothesis is reconceived as an ultimate, instead of proximate, mode of explanation. By this light, desire and capability for suicide combined in our species’ ancestral past, thus making suicide a recurrent survival threat, and driving the evolution of special-purpose defensive adaptations. This stance tallies with the pain-brain theory of the evolution of suicide, and with Joiner and colleagues’ own investigation into organismic anti-suicide defenses, which appears to conflict conceptually with IPTS. These defenses’ evolved algorithm may make suicide an intrinsically aleatory phenomenon, opaque to usefully accurate prediction. Positive implications for prevention and research are proposed.

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Section: Survival Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Desire-capability As An Ultimate Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide

Soper

2022

Omega (Westport)

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“…Likewise, increasing evidence indicates that personality traits like neuroticism or extraversion may influence SB [4]. However, as pointed out by Nishanth and Jha [5] in this issue, little is known about the biological/ neural basis of SB. Hence, genetics could shed light and contribute to our understanding of the biological substrate of this behavior.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%