The suicide of any person has always raised a lot of questions. After all, not only people who were mentally unbalanced or driven into a dead end by life problems laid hands on themselves, but also personalities known to the whole world and millionaires who are in luxury.
What drives them to suicide? What are the motives behind such actions?
The famous philosopher and writer Albert Camus once said that “there is only one really serious philosophical problem - the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer a fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else is secondary."
And Camus is, of course, right in many ways. Because suicide is as eternal a problem as murder. And it has existed practically as long as humanity itself has existed. Moreover, most researchers believe that suicide is characteristic only of humans. And the cases of alleged suicide of animals are either poetic fictions or a misinterpretation of observations of animal behavior.
And this, in fact, a paradoxical phenomenon has turned for many countries with different levels of culture and ethnic composition of the population, social and political system, into an acute and difficult to solve problem.
Suicide is one of the top ten causes of death in the general population. For example, in the USA it is the ninth in this list, in Sweden, Denmark and Finland - the sixth, in Japan - the seventh.
If we talk about the quantitative side of the problem, then, for example, in the United States in the 90s of the last century, 12 suicides per 100,000 people were registered annually. And in Hungary and Sweden even more - 40-38 people per 100,000 inhabitants.
In France, more people commit suicide than die in road accidents. Moreover, in the northern part of France there are three times more cases of suicide than in the southern one.
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In recent years, the number of suicides among young people aged 15 to 24 has increased in Europe and America. There is also an increase in suicides among Russian teenagers.
In general, about 1,500 suicides are committed every day in the world, and the number of deaths from their own hands even exceeds the number of victims at the hands of murderers and rapists.
What pushes people to commit suicide? What are the reasons for this terrible and at the same time strange phenomenon?
There are many of them. As well as many theories explaining the phenomenon of suicide. Among them, three groups of hypotheses can be distinguished that tried to understand the nature of suicide: sociological, anthropological, and psychiatric.
Representatives of the sociological school believe that social conditions lie at the heart of suicide and that neuropsychiatric deviations only in very rare cases cause suicide. That is, in their opinion, suicide is a disease, but not of an individual, but of a social organism.
Another direction - anthropological - considers various anomalies in the structure and development of the body to be the main cause of suicide. Representatives of this school at one time explained suicides by characteristic changes in the skull of suicides: for example, premature overgrowth of the cranial bones, indentations and irregularities of the skull, the formation of bulges on its base. That is, such morphological anomalies that in a certain way produce a mechanical effect on the brain and thus affect the correctness of the course of the mental life of a given person.
But supporters of the psychiatric school explain any suicide by mental disorders. In the recent past, it was generally believed that all suicide was committed in a state of mental abnormality. For a long time, this opinion was held by apologists of the psychopathological concept, which unequivocally considered suicide as a result of mental illness.
However, later, using statistical methods, it was found that only 23-30% of suicides suffered from some kind of mental illness.
The psychoanalytic concept based on Freud's ideas, which interprets suicide as a consequence of a violation of psychosexual personality development, has also become widespread. According to Freud and his supporters, the drive for suicide in adolescents develops in connection with autoeroticism, satisfied with masturbatory excesses, which are considered at the same time as a humiliating act that threatens with grave consequences, and hence there are restrained complexes and a drive for suicide.
Studying the causes of suicide, scientists also studied the structure of the brain of suicides. And they found out that it, in particular, differs in chemical structure from the brain of an ordinary person. Special attention of researchers was attracted by ribosomal RNA, or r-RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins in the brain, which determine many thought processes, such as learning, memory, and the emergence of new connections between brain cells.
In turn, each r-RNA molecule carries special marker proteins, which, when activated, "turn off" it and, thus, stop protein synthesis. So, in the hippocampus - the part of the brain that is responsible for the body's reactions to stress, suicide molecules have much more marker molecules than ordinary people.
On this basis, neuroscientists believe that people with these characteristics are more susceptible to stress, which means they are more likely to commit suicide.
In addition to r-RNA, suicide can also provoke disorders of serotonin metabolism. The study of this connection began in the 60s of the last century. It turned out that in the brain stem structures of suicides, the serotonin content is lowered. In turn, decreased serotonin levels in the brain are closely associated with depression and aggressive behavior, as well as a tendency to commit rash acts.
However, experts differ on the effect of serotonin concentration on suicidal behavior. Some of them note that the lack of serotonin was found only in one part of the brain. Others report a disruption in the sequence of chemical reactions in which serotonin is involved.
Some studies have found a link between the activity of serotonin in the prefrontal cortex of people who wanted to die, and the effectiveness of this attempt.
People who tried to commit suicide in the most “reliable” way, such as taking a large amount of drugs or jumping from a great height, had the lowest serotonin activity in the prefrontal cortex.
And in 1995, American scientists discovered that abnormalities in the serotonin system in people prone to suicide can be determined with a simple blood test. It turned out that the number of serotonin receptors on the blood platelets of patients with suicidal tendencies is significantly higher than in people with a normal psyche.
Thus, from all of the above, an unambiguous conclusion follows: the serotonin system of the brain of suicides has certain disorders.
And already at the very beginning of this century, scientists found that in people who suffered from depression and committed suicide, the number of neurons in the orbital prefrontal cortex (areas of the cortex located directly above the eyes) was below normal.