Five Scientific Reasons Not to Commit Suicide

Dismayed by the recent news of David Foster Wallace's death, I've been wondering about suicide prevention. The traditional messages we offer to those who are suffering - you are not alone, help is always available, don't let temporary mindsets seem like life sentences - are crucial but clearly don't work in all cases. I'm posting some of my personal geek reasons why life is awesome -- scientific truths that would apply even to a person's darkest, most withdrawn moments.

I don't bring these ideas up to trivialize traditional suicide counseling -- I offer them to those who have hit the web in desperation, looking to lift despair and have failed so far. Or just to those who want a place to put their thoughts for a few minutes.

1. Your feelings are all chemicals
Anguish over the loss of a loved one or feelings of helplessness have complex roots. But in the end they make you feel bad because they adjust your brain's chemistry. Happiness and its opposite are both electro-chemical reactions; those reactions are temporary and ineffable, and could even have hidden benefits. The symptoms of depression, for example - lowered energy, decreased willingness to engage with others - could be an evolutionary response to a pressing need to change your life, to get over a loss or make a drastic improvement to your personal situation. Depression provides exactly what you need (calmness, lack of interference) to reassess your life and make positive changes.

2. Your teeth were made in stars
Except for hydrogen and helium, elements require such extraordinarily high temperatures to form that they can only be created in the stars themselves. That means all elements in you - the carbon in your skin, the calcium of your teeth - were born in the collision of atoms in a star. All that comprises you comes from way beyond your street, your country, and your planet. Makes those insurmountable concerns of your daily life seem a little less so.

3. Many, many creatures are depending on you
You are literally never alone. While there are roughly 6.7 billion people on Earth, you may not feel that many of them at all care very much about your existence. But within your colon alone are living at least 1012 billion organisms, or roughly a thousand times the number of people on the planet. Stop your metabolic processes, and you stop theirs.

4. Rejection is a sign of progress.
Pick any scientific field, and you'll find that those snubbed by their communities, left feeling alone and despised, were often those on the forefront. Mendel presented his treatise on pea genetics and died virtually unknown - and the idea of the predictable inheritance of genetic traits only achieved wide acceptance eighty years later. Don't conflate feeling outside those around you with being worse than them.

5. Pick a leaf, and it's all your own.
If you live in the right climate, take a walk down a leafy street this fall. Those leaves, triggered by a sequence of amino acids in DNA and growing in a startling combination of symmetry and individuality (much, that is, like you), face the sun for a time and then fall away. You can assume that the leaf you see let go of a branch and fall towards the ground has never been considered by any being but yourself. Catch it in your hand - or, even better, keep walking until one falls into your reach naturally - and it will have spent its whole time on the planet without ever touching the ground, only because of you.

Comments

[Euler314]

I'd have to add to the list the remarkable fact that e^(iπ) + 1 = 0.

[tc399]

I have to offer a counterpoint. When we reach a certain age, or circumstances imprison us with quality of life issues, we deserve a choice.

Life is not sacred, or no one would offer their's up by volunteering for the military or being a foreman or police officer or miner or herpetologist, or by driving an automobile.

Surely it is logical that someone with a terminal disease, or is in the middle stages of a fatal disease should have the choice of whether to die in bed in agony, or drink a bottle of wine and go SCUBA diving with their talk and BC held only in their hand. When you narc, at ~180 feet or so in the twilight, you simply go to sleep and release your grip on the tank/BC/reg which float to the surface eventually. It is a very comfortable and ecologically friendly was to pass to whatever life you expect next.

People deserve that choice, especially since it is a legal and painless one that no one can prevent.

[superjules]

Maybe this is good advice for a teenager who really doesn't want to die. But for the severely depressed 40 something, not so much. I couldn't care less if the organisms in my GI tract live or die.

[NoSillyName]

Not meant for the seriously, chemically depressed, but for those more minor down times that can indeed be telling us to make some changes.

Good article, except that last one about the leaf.

[peterg76]

Suicide is not failing to recognize the value of life; it's making their pain stop whatever the cost. You can't seriously be suggesting that reminding people of their insignificance in terms of stellar evolution or the fact that bacteria are relying on them is going to discourage suicide.

[mpmp]

Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher, said: "Don't think about killing yourself because anyway is too late"

[KillTheMessenger]

This is some of the worst pieces of "advice" to people in pain (and yes, somebody who thinks about committing suicide is in A LOT of pain) that I have ever read.

Eliot, please read a serious psychology book on depression. You seem to know exactly nothing about it.

I am sorry, but this piece is just so poor, it makes we sick.

[EliotS]

Maybe I should explain where I'm coming from. No one would argue that suicide is one monolithic thing with one root cause. A lifetime of pain and depression is one path, but so are the traps laid by intellect - my experiences with suicide haven't been with family members but with friends, both from college, and both of whom acting impulsively in that youthful gasp at finding their lives don't have meaning. Both showed the classic signs of impulse suicide, and they were both under 21. They were heady people, and quick-acting, and despairing. They'd reached that existential decision that everything is arbitrary, including life. Suicides are overrepresented in the young, and the reasons a nineteen year old has for killing himself can be quite different from someone older. I agree that for most people with suicidal thoughts, my post will do nothing. But for a few of those hemmed into hopelessness by their intellect, it might provide some solace.

Serious, professional help is of course the most important resource. I was just struck that so many don't turn to it, or it fails them. I aimed to add another voice to the mix.

[davism97]

A bit corny but true.

[meme13]

realizing the awe of life on earth [and in the universe] is what helps me hold on...even if sometimes they're only fleeting moments.
great article!

[withcheese]

I would not equate depression with calmness or as providing "exactly" what you need to make life changes. If you watch and listen to DFW in an interview with Charlie Rose years ago, he says something about his head not exploding and that is more in line with what serious depression is like. It is painful emotionally and physically and those I have known who did die by their own hand were abusing substances. (alcohol, cocaine, etc. ) I did not know DFW so I do not know if he had problems with substance abuse. Sometimes when people are depressed they either cannot sleep or want to sleep all of the time and either condition can leave you with impaired ability to reason. And extreme negative emotion, unmitigated by reason, is a dangerous thing. It is difficult to think of reasons to live when you under the bell jar and some people have such an increased sensitivity to everything that it makes life inside their heads simply unbearable. Depression can come in angry rages or in complete withdrawal from society but long-term treatment should be considered and substance abuse issues must be addressed. I have lost two friends in the last two years and they were both in their early 40's and had longstanding mental health and substance abuse issues. I do not like the trend.