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Cited by 16Suicide and Self-Harm StudiesDeath Anxiety and Social ExclusionPsychological Treatments and Disorders

On the Randomness of Suicide: An Evolutionary, Clinical Call to Transcend Suicide Risk Assessment

Soper, C. A., Ocejo, Pablo Malo, Large, Matthew M.·2022·Evolutionary Psychiatry
DOI 10.1017/9781009030564.011
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Abstract

Converging theoretical and empirical evidence points to suicide being a fundamentally aleatory event – that risk of suicide is opaque to useful assessment at the level of the individual. This chapter presents an integrated evolutionary and clinical argument that the time has come to transcend efforts to categorise peoples’ risk of taking their own lives. A brighter future awaits mental healthcare if the behaviour’s essential non-predictability is understood and accepted. The pain-brain evolutionary theory of suicide predicts inter alia that all intellectually competent humans carry the potential for suicide, and that suicides will occur largely at random. The randomness arises because, over an evolutionary timescale, selection of adaptive defences will have sought out and exploited all operative correlates of suicide and will thus have exhausted those correlates’ predictive power. Completed suicides are therefore statistical residuals – events intrinsically devoid of informational cues by which the organism could have avoided self-destruction. Empirical evidence supports this theoretical expectation. Suicide resists useful prediction at the level of the individual. Regardless of the means by which the assessment is made, people rated ‘high risk’ seldom take their own lives, even over extended periods. Consequently, if a prevention treatment is sufficiently safe and effective to be worth allotting to the ‘high-risk’ subset of a cohort of patients, it will be just as worthwhile for the rest. Prevention measures will offer the greatest prospects for success where the aleatory nature of suicide is accepted, acknowledging that ‘fault’ for rare, near-random, self-induced death resides not within the individual but as a universal human potentiality. A realistic, evolution-informed, clinical approach is proposed that focuses on risk communication in place of risk assessment. All normally sapient humans carry a vanishingly small daily risk of taking their own lives but are very well adapted to avoiding that outcome. Almost all of us nearly always find other solutions to the stresses of living.

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Crossref · 10.1017/9781009030564.011

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  • Whether and when suicidal individuals enter the transition phase cannot be predicted.

    “Whether and when suicidal individuals enter the transition phase cannot be predicted; some authors speak of a “mental accident” in which behavioral control over suicidal impulses (suddenly) fails (56), others speak of coincidence (57) and within dynamic systems approaches (29) the term tipping points is used to characterize the sudden shift into a state of acute suicidality.”

    From Ambivalence model of suicidality [ABS-model]: an orientation model for the treatment of suicidal individuals (2024) · cites this paper as [57]

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Authors
Soper, C. A., Ocejo, P. M., & Large, M. M.
ORCID
Venue
Evolutionary Psychiatry
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Published
2022-09-29
Pages
134-152
DOI
10.1017/9781009030564.011
OpenAlex
W4300864659
Cited by
16
References
121
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1
FWCI
29.95
Type
book chapter
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified)
Locations
Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Suicide and Self-Harm Studies
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychological Treatments and Disorders
Keywords
suicide, randomness, evolutionary psychology, suicide risk assessment, suicide risk prediction, suicide prevention, risk communication, mental health services

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