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?

Regarding your traffic example, there's a striking difference in the behavior between young adults who want to signal (and sometimes go through with) committing suicide and older adults who actually want to die.

According to a report released by the American Association of Suicidology1, there are 25 attempts at suicide for every one success.

In young people (aged 15 - 24), the odds are between 100 and 200 to 1 against. The elderly seem a lot more successful at 4:1.

For someone who actually wants to die in the EEA, suicide seems trivially easy. Pick a direction and start walking, if you find water you can drown; if you don't find water, you're dead anyways. If you find animals, some of them want to kill you; if you don't find animals, the environment probably wants to kill you. If you hurt yourself in any way (cutting self, fall from height, eating poisonous food, etc) then you can easily die even if you change your mind and even if somebody can find you (which they won't if you just walked for a day).

For young adults who want to signal suicide, I imagine things would look relatively similar to modern life (minus guns). Jump off high things, eat a lot of things that 'should kill you', self-harm, etc. By a factor of 200:1, the goal of suicide isn't to succeed, it's to make a credible threat (and arguably, that 1-in-200 just messes up). You can make that threat just as easily in the EEA. You don't have to beat your own survival instinct for suicide to be successful, you just have to beat your tribesmates in chicken.

Jumping off a high place in the EEA seems a lot more likely to leave you irreparably handicapped than it is in the present. Possibly eating harmful things as well, depending on what harmful things are available.

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Is suicide high-status?

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Is suicide high-status?

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