The timing of Bering’s book is hardly coincidental. Between 2008 and 2016, suicide rates went up in almost every state, and a spate of recent articles have purported to explain why certain demographics—farmers, veterans—have been killing themselves in unprecedented numbers. Bering’s volume thus joins a niche canon of suicide studies—or suicidologies—which, throughout history, has sought to explore the lure of self-destruction. Such volumes include Émile Durkheim’s “Suicide: A Study in Sociology,” Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” and A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study in Suicide.” Each of these books is a fossil record of its specific historical context. Durkheim’s tome, which was published in 1897, is a glittering testament to the Progressive Era, what with its dogged faith in social engineering and its suggestion that suicides can be thwarted via institutional reform. “The Savage God,” meanwhile, was published in 1971, and is haunted by the spectre of Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis.
Somewhat predictably, then, Bering’s book reflects our own cultural fixations. An early chapter, for instance, wonders if suicide should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation. He summarizes the neuroscientist Denys deCatanzaro, who pioneered the gene-centric view of suicide in the nineteen-eighties, as having said that suicidal thinking is “most common in people facing poor reproductive prospects” and who consume “resources without contributing to their family.” Picture a thirty-year-old burnout who relies on the munificence of a more successful older brother. By committing suicide, this individual might insure his own genetic survival; from a biological standpoint, the older brother’s offspring will have a better chance of thriving if the sponger no longer exists. (As Bering has noted, these “adaptive” decisions aren’t conscious but result, instead, from latent, primordial triggers.) A similar logic underwrites the altruistic suicides that the explorer Knud Rasmussen observed among the Netsilik Inuit community in Canada, where elderly clan members truncated their lives to reduce the caretaking burdens on the next generation. [...]
“Suicidal” contains no mention of economic inequality or the 2008 recession. For those interested in the nonbiological motivations for suicide, these are strange omissions. After all, to ignore the extent to which depression and suicide are responses to the larger culture is to assume that the deprivations of our moment cannot be amended. For the psychologist Oliver James, the author of “The Selfish Capitalist,” attributing depression and suicide to genetics reveals an unchecked commitment to neoliberalism. “That genes explain our behavior and well-being distracts attention from society as a cause,” he writes. Bering admits that suicide isn’t “inescapably” determined by genes, but he fixates throughout on the pathology of the individual. The critic Mark Fisher, who himself committed suicide, in 2017, rejected this approach in his book “Capitalist Realism”: “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.” [...]
For Bering, parsing the etiology of a person’s mental health leaves little room for the musty errand of ideological contemplation. At one point, Bering notes that churchgoers—who place a high premium on communal fallibility—are four times less likely to commit suicide compared with their secular counterparts. But Bering cannot extract any comfort from this statistic. He admits that he cannot espouse “religion or any other belief system in which human suffering is conceived as meaningful.” Setting aside the question of what sorts of suffering Bering means by this, the point is not that we should all don vestments and recite the catechism. Instead, it’s that the systems we embrace might not be value-neutral, at least insofar as they buttress us against the despair that Camus so painstakingly explored.
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