Some controversies in suicidology: toward a mentalistic discipline.

Abstract

The main assertion in this paper is that psychache (mental pain) has a life of its own and is separate from the study of the brain, the organ that cradles the processes of the mind. No amount of biologicizing or medicalizing suicide can gainsay the fact that the human impulse of self-destruction is a decision of mind to put an end to the flow of its own unbearable conscious contents, to stop the psychache. The explanations for suicidal actions lie in the Oxford English Dictionary, not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Unless suicidology asserts and maintains the position that suicide is essentially psychachical, that the main focus of suicidal action is in the mind (as opposed to the mind's somatic abode, the brain), it will lose its identity and its usefulness. This is not just a quarrel over professional territory, money, or power; it is a philosophic war, a fight for the very soul of suicidology--and of the mind.