Ernest Shulman is a Canadian who has lived in New York City for many years. He is a suicide researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York. His specialty is why famous people do or do not kill themselves. He is now at work on a book on the causes of suicide, titled “Thirty Famous Suicides.”

Part 1

After three decades of learning . . .

Many views of the sources of suicide have been proposed over the years. Perhaps the most common and persistent is the idea that a person simply grew tired of living, or found life a wearisome burden. The difficulty here is that all animals, including human beings, harbor a powerful and innate need to survive. This need is too strong to be overcome by boredom or fatigue. Just watch what an insect does when you approach it, or what a fish does when removed from water. Animals all naturally struggle to live.

Many years ago a body of opinion gathered around the notion a person took his or her life after weighing the pros and cons of continuing. That view, happily, fell victim to more current knowledge that people are emotional creatures who do not make major decisions via rational calculation alone.

One approach is that the decision to kill oneself occurs after a severe setback, such as being unmasked as a closet homosexual, or a criminal of some kind. The media tend to discuss suicide by implying adversity as its cause. The problem here is that rarely do people kill themselves when faced with even a terrible setback. They may become depressed or even break down completely. But take their lives — seldom. This approach confuses the trigger for a suicide with the underlying factors, including those of personality.

The modern approach, favored by many, if not most, serious students of the subject (and one that I agree with) is that prolonged pain, or perhaps terror of the future, can be observed in every suicidal individual. Of course, that raises the question of what has caused the pain or terror. Now we come to a major divergence of opinion, a problem yet to be clarified.

What is meant by pain? Usually emotional distress at a high level is meant. Such distress can derive from actual physical pain as well as from guilt or shame. (When pain is prolonged over many months, suicidal thoughts readily arise.) Great fear of the future also enters the picture, and this terror can be referred to as hopelessnes — another factor often associated now with suicidal intent.

Much of the study of suicide causation has centered on sources of shame, either stated directly or indirectly. Clearly, shame is an important underlying factor in many suicides, as is obvious with people who refuse to tolerate a significant disgrace. This point brings me to the personality factor I see in those who take their lives: pathological narcissism. As one well-known scholar, the late Robert Litman put it, “either my way or no way” regarding suicides.

Other issues also are involved. For example, living involves development. A person doesn’t just suddenly become suicidal out of the blue, as it were. We all have our histories. In fact, the clearest circumstance predicting a future suicide is a past non-fatal attempt on one’s life. Keep in mind, however, that about 90% of all those who survived a suicide attempt go on to eventually die natural deaths (especially young women, who make about 100 non-fatal attempts for every actual suicide). Killing oneself is indeed rare. One must overcome strong internal inhibitions to do it; this is revealed in survey results showing about one person in four has seriously contemplated suicide at some point, whereas in the U.S. only around one death in a hundred is self-inflicted.

These considerations suggest the importance of distinguishing between predisposing and precipitating factors in suicide — background vulnerability vs. recent adversity. Examples discovered and confirmed by researchers regarding predisposing aspects: child abuse of all kinds; adult adversities generating post-traumatic stress, such as war combat and rape; community ostracism for alcoholism, mental illness, or other deviances. Community ostracism can also precipitate suicidality, as can such other adversities as war combat, rape, bankruptcy, or long-term unemployment. Such precipitating factors operate by inducing despair and hopelessness.