Suicide and the Problem of Safety

The problem of safety should be considered not only in relation to causing harm to other people and to nature, but also in relation to a person's orientation toward himself. This orientation is most vividly manifested in suicidal behavior, which is expressed in an increased risk of committing suicide.

Internal suicidal manifestations include:

• • suicidal thoughts, fantasies about death ("to fall asleep and not wake up," "if something happened to me and I died");
• • suicidal plans (thinking through methods of suicide, choosing its means and timing);
• • suicidal intentions (a volitional component joins the plan, and the person prepares himself for action).

External forms of suicidal behavior include:

• • suicide attempts — acts of behavior aimed at taking one's own life that did not end in death;
• • completed suicide — actions that end in the person's death.

After a failed suicide attempt, some people begin to value life, sharply change their plans, and "recover," while some of the "unsuccessful" ones carry the matter through to the end, repeating their intentions.

The following types of suicide are distinguished, depending on the characteristics of the individual's contacts with the social environment:

• anomic suicide, associated with crisis situations in life, personal tragedies (death of a loved one, loss of property, etc.);

• • altruistic suicide, committed for the good of other people (so as not to burden others, not to bring shame, etc.);
• • egoistic suicide, associated with the unacceptability of social demands (a form of "escape" from an unfavorable social situation).

A common cause of suicide is socio-psychological maladjustment arising under the influence of acute psychologically traumatic situations and a disruption of the individual's interaction with his immediate environment. Causes of suicidal behavior can include complicated family relationships, illness (including mental illness), unrequited love, drunkenness and alcoholism, material problems, poor academic performance, and punishment at school. For adolescents, this is most often associated with a disruption of communication with loved ones and family (an atmosphere of hatred, aggression, rudeness, injustice, the death of one parent, alcoholism in the family), which makes the child feel lost, lonely, and unneeded. Children commit suicide as a result of resentment, humiliation, misunderstanding, and insincerity on the part of their parents.

Russian psychologists Ts. P. Korolenko and T. A. Donskikh, the founders of the typology of non-chemical addictions, name the causes of increased suicide risk:

• 1) one-sided upbringing in a spirit of maximalism;
• 2) lack of parental love for children;
• 3) instilling a sense of guilt in children, when a child rates himself lower than others and considers himself "bad," lacking any sense of self-respect;
• 4) parental alcoholism;
• 5) psychological trauma in children;
• 6) a pathological psychological climate in the family;
• 7) parents' inability to make their children's lives happy, and to develop in them a sense of self-confidence and love of life.

In the case of adolescents, suicidal behavior can become imitative. Adolescents copy patterns of behavior that they see around them, that are offered to them by television and popular literature. Imitation is especially characteristic of immature, suggestible individuals. Thus, an adolescent may see that death frightens those around him and is an effective means of "pressuring" his offenders.

The prerequisites for suicide are apathy, disbelief in personal prospects, and a decline in creative and vital activity as a result of psychological trauma. However, the presence of a psychologically traumatic situation is not a sufficient condition for the manifestation of suicide. The second component is the personality characteristics of the suicidal individual. There is an opinion that a number of personality traits prevent a person from responding adequately to life's problems and thereby predispose him to suicide.

Personality traits that predispose a person to suicide include:

• 1) tension of needs and desires, and an inability to find ways to satisfy them;
• 2) refusal to seek a way out of difficult situations;
• 3) a low level of self-control;
• 4) an inability to relieve nervous-psychological tension;
• 5) emotional instability, impulsivity, heightened suggestibility;
• 6) uncompromisingness and lack of life experience.

Table 4. Types of accentuation prone to suicide

Based on descriptions of the pathocharacterological types of accentuation in adolescents, compiled by the Russian psychiatrist A. E. Lichko, we have compiled Table 4. Among adolescents, suicide occurs more often with the following types of accentuation: histrionic, sensitive, asthenic, and emotionally labile.

The background for the development of suicidal manifestations is a high level of aggressiveness in the adolescent. In this case, the aggressiveness takes the form of auto-aggression, that is, aggression directed at oneself. With timely diagnosis of internal activity, a suicidal act can be prevented and will not become external behavior. Therefore, within the psychology of safety, attention should be paid to corrective and preventive measures, especially in work with adolescents and young people prone to suicide.

• Character accentuation — an intensification of individual traits, in which deviations in the psyche and behavior of a person are observed that do not go beyond the norm, but border on pathology.