Preface: I Think Suicide Is No Big Deal

Everyone is bound to die; either they die by suicide, or they do not...

This might sound a bit harsh, or even offensive. Because in our culture, suicide has always been a taboo judged by morality and despised by society. It is labeled with tags like "cowardly," "irresponsible," and "shameful," as if it were a complete collapse of personal will, a testament to family disgrace. My mother once expressed her fear and worry with the words, "If you die outside and no one knows, we won't be embarrassed." That was not a cherishing of my life, but a dread of public scrutiny. They thought I was "faking illness to scam money," believing that mental agony could be dissolved by a mere "there are still long days ahead."

But I want to say: I think suicide is no big deal.

This is by no means a contempt for life, let alone indifference to suffering. Quite the contrary. It is precisely because I have been in that abyss, and because I have personally experienced how a mental disorder—like a silent war—erodes a person's will, perception, and physiological functions, that I understand suicide. First and foremost, it is a phenomenon, a result, rather than a simple moral choice. It is not the "ultimate misjudgment" of the will to live; as Schopenhauer put it, that is merely the pale helplessness of philosophy when facing physiological and pathological realities. When the brain's neurotransmitters are imbalanced, when the circuits of the connectome become abnormal, and when the body's metabolic system is disrupted, to what extent can the so-called "will" and "reason" control a physical shell manipulated by disease?

Mental illness is not a matter of you "not letting go of things," nor is it you "not being strong enough," and it is certainly not your "moral bankruptcy." It is a physiological illness, just like diabetes and hypertension, with its own biological basis, genetic susceptibility, and neuropathological mechanisms. It deprives people of their appetite, makes them somnolent, renders them unable to think, prevents them from feeling pleasure, and even makes them feel that living itself is an unbearable burden. When a person is trapped by such a disease, the thought of suicide is merely one of the symptoms of the illness—a distorted expression of the survival instinct under extreme agony.

Therefore, the purpose of this book is not to judge, nor to lecture, and certainly not to encourage. It simply wishes to use a scientific perspective to deconstruct the mist wrapped in layers of morality and prejudice. It wants to tell you that suicide has its scientific principles, its understandable pathology, and its pathways for intervention. It wants you to realize that the suffering deemed "shameful" by society is actually a physiological cry; the behaviors misunderstood as "not letting go" are actually manifestations of disease.

I hope that, through this book, we can tear off those unnecessary moral labels from suicide and mental illness together. Let us face them and understand them with the rigor of natural science and the insights of neuroscience, and eliminate the blind confidence in "just getting over it," ultimately leading to the scientific treatment and control of various mental disorders, while preventing suicide.

On the origin of The Principles of Interaction Among Genetic Mutations, Development, Metabolism, and Social-Environmental Factors in Mental Disorders:

Actually, at the very beginning, I did not plan to write this booklet. Originally, I only wanted to put my study materials and research reports on bipolar disorder and related mental disorders onto this independent website. However, as my own study and research deepened, I felt that I should write a small booklet—something of tens of thousands of words—to consolidate these insights and understanding into a "compiled work." By compressing the volume, I could increase the information density, making it more convenient to share with interested readers for reference. And admittedly, those research reports, reference materials, and papers often run into tens of thousands of words for a single piece; for example, the recent article "Suicide and Neuroinflammation" is over forty thousand characters when translated from English to Chinese, which is unnecessary for average readers to read from cover to cover. Furthermore, only by synthesizing these insights from study and research, and introducing my views on suicide-related mental disorders—especially bipolar disorder—to you, the readers, through my own understanding, can it be considered a truly original work.

Initially, I decided to introduce Camus because of his quote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." This made me think that perhaps I could find some knowledge and references from the profound words of philosophical predecessors to help understand suicide and mental disorders. However, I was later infuriated by another statement of his: "Society has little to do with it [suicide]." It felt to me that he was merely playing with words, showing absolutely no care for the true sources of pressure on those who commit suicide. He was like a court writer brainwashing the poor (which fits well with the situation in France during the 1930s and 1940s—a failed state and a suffering populace).

Then, I thought that if we can already determine the physiological and pathological mechanisms of various mental disorders from the level of genomes and genes, and from the functional localization of brain regions in the nervous system and lesions in brain neural connections, then we should no longer resort to philosophical thought experiments and those psychological theories and "techniques" that lack scientific rigor and verifiability to understand various related mental disorders (also known as mental illnesses).

Many theories in psychology are born out of a certain trend of thought on someone's whim. For instance, the psychoanalytic school was founded by Freud, but it is a set of "theories" that can neither be verified nor falsified, heavily influenced by Nietzsche's philosophical thoughts—a fact he deliberately concealed. His interpretation of dreams and pansexualism were merely fabricated from his clinical experiences with a tiny handful of "hysterical" aristocratic ladies.

Actually, Freud originally wanted to establish a psychological science based on "neuroscience," or rather, a "science of consciousness based on brain science." Unfortunately, in his era, the development of neuroscience and brain science, along with related technologies, fell far short of conducting "scientific experiments" on "consciousness." Anatomy in his time was also insufficiently developed; the human brain he could see was not much different from a clump of pig brains we eat in hot pot. Let alone electron microscope sections, even slicing it was difficult. Consequently, Freud could only regretfully stray into the path of "pseudoscience." Had old Freud been born in the 21st century and seen the US brain Initiative and brain 2.0 Initiative, which allow the observation of physiological activities in the human brain through MRI and CT imaging, he would have undoubtedly chosen to be a neuroscientist rather than a quack (doctor) helping sexually frustrated aristocratic ladies alleviate the "hysteria" caused by loneliness.

And about downplaying the weight of those so-called values in "philosophical thoughts," such as "whether life is worth living." When discussing the topic "philosophy is dead," I noticed many people highly praise the philosopher Wittgenstein. So, I looked into Wittgenstein's life. It must be said that as a philosopher, Wittgenstein himself did not seek to cure his own familial genetic mental disorder from the perspective of "philosophical thoughts." Wittgenstein had four older brothers, three of whom committed suicide.

Therefore, when we pin our hopes of curing mental disorders such as bipolar disorder on philosophy, are we really going to be better at philosophizing than Wittgenstein, the most genius philosopher of the twentieth century?

Among the numerous praises for this most genius philosopher of the twentieth century, there is one negative criticism we can listen to:

I am willing to believe such criticism. First, the philosophy of mind of philosophers is speculative and unscientific. For instance, Nietzsche's philosophy of mind, which laid the foundation for Freud's psychoanalysis, or Camus's so-called "serious philosophy of suicide," which I have already discarded earlier, are either speculative or a bunch of "self-evident" "truths" as Camus called them.

However, I want to preserve one thing: "the scientific research of psychology." In any case, looking at the entire history of psychology from the 19th century to the present, by analyzing different schools, we can draw the conclusion that "the scientific nature of psychology is limited and questionable." For psychology to become a scientific system, it possesses several fatal flaws. We can analyze this in a separate chapter later.

Therefore, what we need to clarify at this point is that in our study and research of "suicide" and its related mental disorders, we adopt scientific methods and theories. Only when we are scientific in our methodology—or relatively more scientific—can we align with the title of our book, The Scientific Principles of Suicide. After everything we have discussed, our goal is to remove philosophy, and its youngest son—psychology, from our methodological framework as much as possible, except for some theories and methods from branches of psychology with strong natural-science attributes.