Is suicide high-status?

Stabilizer

I sometimes have thoughts of suicide. That does not mean I would ever come within a mile of committing the act of suicide. But my brain does simulate it; though I do try to always reduce such thoughts.

But what I have noticed is that 'suicide' is triggered in my mind whenever I think of some embarrassing event, real or imagined. Or an event in which I'm obviously a low-status actor. This leads me to think that suicide might be a high-status move, in the sense that its goal is to recover status after some event which caused a big drop in status. Consider the following instances when suicide is often considered:

One-sided break-ups of romantic relationships. The party who has been 'dumped' (for the lack of a better word), has obviously taken a giant status hit. In this case, suicide is often threatened.
A samurai committing seppuku. The samurai has lost in battle. Clearly, a huge drop in status (aka 'honor').
PhD student says he/she can't take it anymore. A PhD is a constant hit in status: you aren't smart enough, you don't have much money, and you don't yet have intellectual status.

Further, suicide (or suicidal behavior leading to death) seems to have conferred status to artists. Examples: Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace and many more. I'm not saying that they committed suicide due to a pressure to achieve high-status (though that may be the case, I'm not sure). What I am saying is that suicide has been associated with high-status.

Further, after a person is dead, he/she is almost always celebrated (at least for a while) and all their faults are forgotten.

My theory: in many low-status situations, an instinctive way to recover status is to say that you are too good for this game and check-out. In fact, children (and adults) will often just leave a game they're not very good at and disparage the rest of the players for playing. And suicide is the ultimate check-out. This theory is motivated by observations of my own brain going through thoughts of suicide. They almost always consist of imagining other people crying about my death and saying what an awesome person he was. And about how he was just too smart to be able to live in this world.

Do you think this theory has some weight? I'm certain that I'm not the first person to think of this. But a quick Google didn't yield much. Any pointers to literature?

One-sided break-ups of romantic relationships. The party who has been 'dumped' (for the lack of a better word), has obviously taken a giant status hit. In this case, suicide is often threatened.
A samurai committing seppuku. The samurai has lost in battle. Clearly, a huge drop in status (aka 'honor').
PhD student says he/she can't take it anymore. A PhD is a constant hit in status: you aren't smart enough, you don't have much money, and you don't yet have intellectual status.

Further, after a person is dead, he/she is almost always celebrated (at least for a while) and all their faults are forgotten.

Do you think this theory has some weight? I'm certain that I'm not the first person to think of this. But a quick Google didn't yield much. Any pointers to literature?

It's intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don't get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.

1) Negotiation suicide
2) Apoptosis suicide
3) Malfunction suicide

Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or 'cry for help' suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn't get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you'd kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to 'risk' suicide for status at a rate that used to be helpful 100,000 years ago, and not so much now.

Apoptosis suicide is when people sacrifice themselves so that their genes (children/family/tribe/country) can have better chances of propagation via kin selection. Note that these suicides are rarely preceded by any sort of warning and are usually done in very effective, premeditated manners. The prototypical example would be an elderly blind man with health problems choosing to die-with-dignity, and poisoning himself after having a chance to visit his grandkids one last time. Rates of suicide go up with advanced age and go up with disability. Suicide rates dramatically go up with vision impairment, which was a pretty huge hindrance in hunter-gatherer times.

The last type of suicide is just when something goes wrong in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, etc can cause this (eg Cobain). Brain damage is a cause of suicide as well, like in football players and boxers (eg Jr Seau). Bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses also are massive risk factors in suicide, though this may arguably be apoptosis instead. Malfunction suicide could also partially account for some teen suicides, given how wild a ride hormones are.

NB: I'm working off memory of a past LW post that I can't seem to locate now on the evolutionary basis of depression and suicide, which had the actual cites.

Edit: To more directly address your point, it doesn't make sense to "say that you are too good for this game and check-out". This is almost negotiation suicide except you're using a shitty, losing strategy to do so. You only check-out if there's an advantage to be gained. It's effective to credibly threaten to check out if that can secure you more resources with the threat. The only way your brain can credibly threaten is if it's prepared to actually go all the way and some percentage of people go through with it. However, life is a game you can only win if you keep playing.

Were there really suicide methods easily available in the EEA?

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Is suicide high-status?

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Is suicide high-status?

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