Soper C A
Private Practice, Lisbon, Portugal.
Omega (Westport). 2024 May;89(1):292-314. doi: 10.1177/00302228211073010. Epub 2022 Apr 13.
Joiner and colleagues' (IPTS), a prominent "desire-capability" model of suicide-based on the common-sense idea that people take their own lives because they want to, and can-is critiqued from a biological perspective. Tinbergen's ethological "four questions" guide the analysis: evolution, survival value, ontogeny, and proximate causation, each addressing a different aspect of biological understanding. Problems for IPTS emerge with all four. As a parsimonious solution, the desire-capability hypothesis is reconceived as an ultimate, instead of proximate, mode of explanation. By this light, desire and capability for suicide combined in our species' ancestral past, thus making suicide a recurrent survival threat, and driving the evolution of special-purpose defensive adaptations. This stance tallies with the theory of the evolution of suicide, and with Joiner and colleagues' own investigation into organismic anti-suicide defenses, which appears to conflict conceptually with IPTS. These defenses' evolved algorithm may make suicide an intrinsically aleatory phenomenon, opaque to usefully accurate prediction. Positive implications for prevention and research are proposed.
乔伊纳及其同事的人际心理理论自杀模型（IPTS）是一种基于“人们因为想要且能够自杀所以才会自杀”这一常识的著名“欲望-能力”自杀模型，本文从生物学角度对其进行了批判。廷伯根的动物行为学“四个问题”指导了分析：进化、生存价值、个体发生以及近因，每个问题都涉及生物学理解的不同方面。IPTS在这四个方面都存在问题。作为一个简洁的解决方案，欲望-能力假说被重新构想为一种终极而非近因的解释模式。据此观点，自杀的欲望和能力在我们物种的祖先过去就已结合在一起，因此自杀成为一种反复出现的生存威胁，并推动了特殊目的防御适应的进化。这一立场与自杀进化理论以及乔伊纳及其同事对机体抗自杀防御的自身研究相一致，而这一研究在概念上似乎与IPTS相冲突。这些防御机制进化出的算法可能使自杀成为一种本质上具有偶然性的现象，难以进行有效准确的预测。本文还提出了对预防和研究的积极影响。
