Content area
Full Text
A psychologist wants to shape data about the phenomenon into a unified theory. His interest is personal as well as scholarly.
For two decades, Thomas Joiner has been trying to grasp and shape a quicksilver stream of information into a unified theory about suicide, which claims 30,000 Americans annually, and one million people worldwide. Previous investigators have had, at best, a mixed record of predicting who will commit suicide and how to prevent such deaths. Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and a leading researcher on the topic, believes that he has found the key--or, rather, three keys.
He develops his ideas in Myths About Suicide (Harvard University Press), building on his earlier Why People Die by Suicide, published by Harvard in 2005. In both books, his quest entails more than combating a global health problem; Joiner also seeks to understand his father's own suicide.
The gist of his theory is simple: Whatever forces influence a person's determination to die, three core factors fatally combine to generate the necessary drive. One is what Joiner calls "perceived burdensomeness," the feeling of having become a burden to loved ones. The second is "failed belongingness," a profound disconnection, loneliness, and alienation, spiraling down through depression and further isolation. The last is "learned fearlessness," a capacity to inflict lethal self-injury, developed through habituation to the fear and pain that suicide entails. That may involve self-harm of various kinds, including repeated tentative suicide attempts, and the kind of exposure to pain and fear that people also might learn through such experiences as mountain climbing, performing surgery, fighting in wars, or being afflicted with anorexia.
No mini-theories for him. Joiner aspires to the kind of "universal" (his word) theory developed by some of the biggest names in the history of psychology--Erikson, Kohlberg, Piaget. "I invite clinicians and scientists to try to refute it," he says, "because either they won't, or they will, and we'll learn something from how they do it."
History suggests there will be disagreement. Although Joiner calls suicide seriously understudied, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published Le suicide in 1897, focusing on social alienation. Among the central tenets of Freud's theories was the paradoxical death instinct of human beings. The...