SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR

In order to understand suicidal behavior we must expand our perspective and not contemplate suicide only from personal problems, but its meaning is built in the cultural and symbolic order in which it is immersed. We see it embodied in the exile that was a traditional accompaniment of shame, in primitive societies the exile was equivalent to death being the basis of rejection and failure.

When our self is in danger and feels abandoned by the powers that depend as the affective bonds is allowed to die, it is the same situation that occurs before the separation of the protective mother, resurges the narcissistic suffering by the collapse of the illusion of omnipotence.

There is a state that is melancholy where there is a loss of one’s self, a state similar to mourning, where one experiences a deep sorrow with the disappearance of interest in the outside world, diminution of self-love and disturbance of self-esteem, it is sadism turned against oneself that allows us to understand the tendency towards suicide that characterizes melancholy. In severe depression , despair causes the will to live to be lost, but in the deepest even the act of suicide is not possible due to the lack of energy, paradoxically when the person leaves the severe apathy of depression and earns more courage, is capable of committing suicide, where the phase of agitated depression arises and with it the energy sufficient to take life exists.

Loss of hope and willingness to live along with the severe depression that accompanies it often occurs in lonely or isolated people, may also be elderly or people who have experienced intense psychological exhaustion such as a divorce, a financial disaster, the loss of a loved one or the grieving process.

Death for these people can be seen as an attraction, identifying it with the end of suffering, we must see suicide as an act of despair where hope is totally lost, without perspective there is no possible way.