‘What destroys a person when that person appears to be destroying himself?’¹

A rough-and-ready proof of concept for Passive suicidality in a repressive U.S. political context.

Description: Critical suicidology implicates oppressive societal hierarchies and cultural scripts in undermining human worth intra-psychically. Per Button:

Individual cognitive strategies are really no match for a wider system of socialization that burns into the psyche a conception of responsible autonomous agency that contains, as its dark underside, self-loathing and potential self-destruction for failing to live up to its impossible demands.²

The internalization of these systemic, “intrapolitical,” drivers of hopelessness may represent a key pathway to suicidal ideation. We fine-tuned theoretically grounded pretrained BERT and DistilBERT models to detect expressions of perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, self-hatred, and loneliness among r/SuicideWatch post authors. Embracing a radically reflexive methodology, which highlights and interrogates investigator subjectivity amid the act of knowledge creation, thematic analysis isolated potential collective and within-person psychopolitical determinants of suicidality.

Preprint

A preprint is available on OSF Preprints at https://osf.io/preprints/osf/pa93y.

Footnotes

1. The title is taken from Judith Butler: Senses of the Subject. Fordham University Press; 2015. ↩

2. Button ME. Suicide and social justice: toward a political approach to suicide. Political Res Q. 2016;69(2):270-280. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916636689 ↩