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The Varieties of Suicidal Experience

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View the page of Thomas Joiner

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Mass shooters often display behaviors mirroring suicide warning signs. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Joiner argues that many homicidal acts are primarily suicidal. Recognizing this can help prevent such atrocities.

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 8, 2023

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This video video discusses the complex relationship between various forms of violence, such as murder-suicide, suicide terrorism, and suicide by cop, and emphasizes that many of these acts are motivated by suicidal thoughts. The speaker initially struggled with questions about these topics but was compelled to explore them further, leading to significant insights. They found that beneath these acts of violence lies a commonality: they often originate from suicidal motivations, even though they manifest differently in various contexts.

The speaker highlights that individuals who engage in acts like suicide by cop are essentially reaching out for a lethal agent, often prompting law enforcement to take lethal action intentionally. They present evidence, such as individuals leaving letters addressing officers, clearly indicating that these acts are rooted in suicide rather than spontaneous murder.

Moreover, the speaker critiques narratives that deny the connection between suicide and these violent acts, especially in the context of suicide terrorism, where perpetrators may believe their actions serve a higher cause. They argue that in reality, many of these individuals share histories characteristic of those who die by suicide.

The discussion extends to the psychological motivations behind these actions, emphasizing feelings of alienation, hopelessness, and an erroneous belief that their death would benefit others. This video video concludes with a commitment to preventing such tragedies and fostering a hopeful perspective on the future efforts of young researchers in suicide prevention. Overall, it presents a call for deeper understanding and prevention strategies rooted in recognizing the suicidal origins of various violent behaviors.

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Regular questioning, you know, that,

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that are directed towards me of, you know, you, you seem

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to know a lot about, about suicide,

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but what about murder suicide?

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Or what about suicide? Terrorism?

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Or what about, you know, suicide by cop?

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Does that, what does the relation,

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and, you know, for years,

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my answer was essentially, you know, I don't really know.

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I'm kind of got my hands full with, you know,

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suicide prevention, you know, per se.

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Uh, I don't know. But I kept getting

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that question in lectures and workshops and so forth.

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And, and so it, you know, it eventually motivated,

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motivated me to take a look.

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And then once I did a, an intriguing thing happened and it,

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and that really motivated the rest of the arc of the book.

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And, and a lot of my work is that when you really kinda look

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underneath these forms of violence, many, if not all of them

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really sh really share a very important,

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overlap in that they are initially motivated by suicide.

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They end up looking kind of different,

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but at the beginning, the genesis of it, they,

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they really are suicidal in, in motivation and in nature.

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And so, explaining that I thought,

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I thought was just an interesting insight.

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Something that I've learned a lot from and,

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and one that I think has a lot of implications

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for things like prevention.

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That's the term of art in the, in the,

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in the, you know, discourse.

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And I, I don't love the term, but I use it

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because it's the term of art.

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And, you know, I have a lot of respect

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for law enforcement officers

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and, you know, a cop who's not necessarily the most, most,

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most respectful, but, but it is the term of art.

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And so I use it in the book.

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And in any event, I really do think the, basically these,

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these are in a, in a suicide per se.

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So, you know, conventional suicide,

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however you wanna say, that the person accesses a method

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a means of suicide, whether it be an overdose agent,

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a ligature, a a firearm.

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They access some sort of method and a suicide by cop.

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They're doing the same thing.

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It's the same exact mind state, the same exact process.

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And they too are reaching out for a lethal agent.

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In their case, it just happens

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to be a law enforcement officer.

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In other words, they're inducing the off officer

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to kill them on purpose in many cases, quite clearly.

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So as I, as I documented the book, for instance,

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there are a number of incidents in which someone has written

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a letter in advance to the officer.

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They don't know yet which officer it'll be.

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So they're not making a specific note,

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but they're saying something along the lines of, you know,

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to whomever I induce to kill me, I'm so sorry.

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I, I, I'm very, very sorry that it came to this.

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Those kinds of letters, they're really common

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and they make it crystal clear that these are,

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these are suicides.

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They're just, instead of using a direct method such

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as a firearm on oneself, it's just one step removed.

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Use using the officer as a method of suicide.

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I think we should add incidentally, that,

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that these incidents are very difficult for officers

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who are involved, very difficult.

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Uh, I mean, sometimes to the point

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of them having lasting over the course of years

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and decades, PTSD in reaction to them, it makes sense.

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They've killed someone that's very momentous.

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And so these are, these, this is a horrible tragedy

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for the people who are killed.

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Uh, it's also very difficult on the

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law enforcement officers.

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This one is really intriguing

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because the, you know, there is a, a narrative

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emanating, it seems to me mainly from the leaders

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of such groups, that this has nothing at all at whatsoever

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at all to do with suicide.

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They, they do promote that narrative.

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And, and in fact, I think it's their belief in, in some ways

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that this is, you know, not that at all, that it's

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a holy mission or, you know,

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some other motivation is at, is at bottom.

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But I, I've developed some skepticism about that.

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And then looking into the literature on it,

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my skepticism grew into just disbelief.

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Um, that it's, that it's about anything other than suicide,

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for instance, if it's not about suicide, well then

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the perpetrators of suicide, terrorism, their,

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their histories, their own personal histories, as well

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as their family histories should look like anyone else.

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It should look like, you know, maybe,

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maybe other religious people,

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but not, not, they shouldn't look like suicide,

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decedents family history or, or personal histories.

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And yet they do, they, they, they do look like that.

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Uh, and there are other similarities as well.

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Um, you know, my view of it has be, has become that,

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you know, even though the leaders of these groups,

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maybe the, the, the perpetrators themselves will,

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will say things like, this is not about that.

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This is about commitment.

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This is about religion, this, it's about justice.

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Those are, those are overlays on a suicidal foundation.

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I mean, just to your point about

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how intriguing these things are

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and also how they hit hard, I mean, I,

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I do think both things are very true.

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And the, the first thing is really, really important to, to,

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to emphasize because we're talking about

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life and death questions.

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We're also talking about a, a window on the meaning

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of life itself in a way.

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And for me, that's not the main reason to, to be,

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a suicide prevention researcher

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as I have been for decades now.

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It, but it is a main reason.

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The main reason though, is not that, it's that these, these

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incidents are killing people every day.

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And I would like to put a stop to that.

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That's the, but there also is interesting

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intellectual perspective

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and philosophical even perspective

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that one gains from pondering these, these things

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murder, suicide.

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I, I, I was certain that when I delved into it,

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there would be several deaths that were not

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of a suicidal character,

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but no, rather, where someone has,

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has perpetrated a murder per, perhaps they've done it,

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you know, on the spur of the moment,

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but perhaps they've planned it.

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And then

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because they have done something that they instantly

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or soon regret, they then form a plan for suicide.

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In other words, in that scenario, murder is primary.

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Murder was the origin point for that kind of process.

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And I was going into it, I was pretty sure

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that there would be several such scenarios,

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but I kept reading and kept reading and kept reading.

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And I couldn't find any like that.

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All of them were the, the reverse, if you, if you will.

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In other words, somebody becomes suicidal.

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Maybe for instance, they, they were,

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they were rejected by a romantic interest,

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and they spiraled down into a, a, a depression.

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And that depression had a suicidal element,

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and they started to think about suicide.

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And then at some point in the thinking process,

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their thoughts were along the lines of, wait a minute, this,

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this was, I didn't do this.

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She did it to me

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because of him, perhaps some other, you know,

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romantic rival or something.

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They, if I'm gonna die, they should die too.

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That's only the right and just thing that kind of thought.

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And I actually wrote a book several years on this called The

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Perversion of Virtue.

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And, and I, I, I take this point up again in this,

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this new book, called The Varieties

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of Suicidal Experience, where I make the point

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that even though I was open to that possibility that

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that murder would be primary,

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I could really find no evidence that that hardly ever,

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if ever occurred.

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And, and rather all of them were these suicidal scenarios

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that that morphed via a perversion of virtue.

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In other words, you know, the person, to the person,

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it feels like the right thing, the just thing,

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sometimes it's justice that's perverted.

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Sometimes it's mercy that's perverted.

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But in one way or another, some virtue is, is embraced

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by the person, the suicidal person, person,

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and they pervert it, and then they start thinking

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that person needs to die too.

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'cause that's the right thing to do.

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That's what I think applies to all if, you know, most,

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if not all murder suicide incidents.

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And I, I I, I expand on that idea in,

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in the varieties of, of suicidal experience.

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I incidentally, I've stolen that title

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as I point out in the book.

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Um, or, you know, maybe more, you know, kindly to me, I've,

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managed an homage to somebody that I really admire.

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And it's, it's the great William James

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who wrote a book called The Varieties

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of Religious Experience.

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And I'm, I'm just using that same title,

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but I've changed one word.

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Uh, and the two efforts actually do have something in common

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in that James was trying to point, at least in part

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of the work, to commonalities that are,

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that are at bottom there, regularities commonality

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that are there across different kinds of religious thought

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and tradition, somewhat similarly,

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I'm looking at different forms of violence

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and arguing that all of them underneath at bottom

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are suicidal in origin.

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You know, I've developed a model of suicide.

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I did this, I have been doing this,

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and still am doing this over the course of, of decades.

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And the idea is that there, there are, there's a

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one thing we should acknowledge right off the bat is that,

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is that suicide decedents, people who have died

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by suicide, they're people.

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And so they have the, the same kinds of uniquenesses

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and dignities and, and lives and problems as people

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and, and just like people do, they differ from one another.

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They're different in their experience,

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they're different in their beliefs and their values,

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and they're, they're different in their demographics,

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et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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There's a lot of variability between suicidal,

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decedents, those who have died by suicide, that is

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one can take that variability and,

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and expand it into such complexity

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that explaining suicide seems hopeless.

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And there, there is a line of thought on that,

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that's current.

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I, I reject that line of thought

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because I, I do think it's complex,

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and I do think there are irregularities and,

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and commonalities in the suicidal mindset.

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What I've pointed to as commonalities are things like

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the idea that what you're doing is, is better.

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It's just better for everybody.

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It's just, it's just the right thing to do for a variety

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of reasons, reasons everybody will be better off

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with, with you gone.

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That, that, that mindset, you can see how

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that would be facilitative of, of suicide.

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Uh, another regularity that, that occurs, you know,

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recurs across death, across incidents is the, is the belief

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that one is hopelessly, you know, alienated or,

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or disconnected socially, from others.

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Now, this is not a new idea that Durkheim

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actually talked about this in the 18 hundreds, and people

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before him have talked about it, but I think it's

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because it's a key and obvious

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regularity in the suicidal mind

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that it's come up across centuries now

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and then this one has not come up much across centuries.

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And this is a novel insight of this theory, though,

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once you think about it, it's so obvious,

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and the, the insight is that suicide's hard to do.

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It involves actually staring death in the face

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and not flinching.

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Most people are simply not capable

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of doing that, understandably.

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And naturally enough, we have self-preservation instincts

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wired deeply into us as do creatures, the, the world over.

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Of course, it's hard. And of course, many people who

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have the desire, the genuine desire, of course, they flinch

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or back off at the last incident, it only makes sense.

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But that, that idea so obvious once it's stated,

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had not been articulated very well previous

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to my work on my, my model of suicidal behavior.

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Those are the regularities that I think apply to suicide.

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And because I think things like suicide, terrorism, murder,

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suicide, even, although this one's sensitive and,

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and controversial and quite debatable,

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physician-assisted suicide, if those all are suicides,

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well then the same regularity should apply to them,

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namely, that they feel like they're a burden,

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they feel like they're alienated

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and they have a kind of fearlessness of death

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that is unnatural

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and that most people just don't, don't have to prevent them.

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These are, these are horrible atrocities, horrible tragedies

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in, in many cases, completely in, you know,

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innocent strangers are, are, are horribly murdered in,

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you know, for instance, in, in murder, suicide and,

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and mass murder, suicide.

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In instances that's the case.

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And suicide, terrorism, that can be the case.

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But even if it weren't, even if, if, if, you know,

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one person is, is killed, it's a horrible tragedy.

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It means not only the loss of that person's life,

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but the, the effect on family

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and others, not just for months or years, but for decades.

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And you could even make the case across generations.

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It, it's, it really does have a, a scarring effect on,

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or can have a scarring effect on people.

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Uh, there's just, there's just an endless number of reasons

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to prevent something as egregious and tragic

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and sad as this.

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And, that's the main reason for the work.

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And, you know, it's just, it is the priority.

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It's the only thing I really care about professionally.

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I really don't care about my model of, you know,

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so if there's another route to the lowering

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of the suicide death rate in the United States,

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but not just there, the world over, if there's a lowering of

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that by any means, I'm all for that.

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That's my, that's my main priority professionally,

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and I've got a lot of hope about that mainly

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because of our young people.

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I, I, I have people coming into my PhD program

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who are in their twenties. I'm their major

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Professor. I direct

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to work, and then they go out from here

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and their professors themselves now, I'm so proud

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of them and they're the future.

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And, and so I have a lot of hope that that generation

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and the generation that they train

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will make progress in bringing these rates down.

00:00 - Regular questioning, you know, that, that are directed towards me of, you know, you, you seem to know a lot about, about suicide, but what about murder suicide? Or what about suicide? Terrorism? Or what about, you know, suicide by cop?

00:16 - Does that, what does the relation, and, you know, for years, my answer was essentially, you know, I don't really know. I'm kind of got my hands full with, you know, suicide prevention, you know, per se. I don't know. But I kept getting that question in lectures and workshops and so forth. And, and so it, you know, it eventually motivated, motivated me to take a look. And then once I did a, an intriguing thing happened and it,

00:41 - and that really motivated the rest of the arc of the book. And, and a lot of my work is that when you really kinda look underneath these forms of violence, many, if not all of them really sh really share a very important, overlap in that they are initially motivated by suicide. They end up looking kind of different, but at the beginning, the genesis of it, they, they really are suicidal in, in motivation and in nature. And so, explaining that I thought, I thought was just an interesting insight.

01:16 - Something that I've learned a lot from and, and one that I think has a lot of implications for things like prevention. That's the term of art in the, in the, in the, you know, discourse. And I, I don't love the term, but I use it because it's the term of art. And, you know, I have a lot of respect for law enforcement officers and, you know, a cop who's not necessarily the most, most,

01:39 - most respectful, but, but it is the term of art. And so I use it in the book. And in any event, I really do think the, basically these, these are in a, in a suicide per se. So, you know, conventional suicide, however you wanna say, that the person accesses a method a means of suicide, whether it be an overdose agent, a ligature, a a firearm. They access some sort of method and a suicide by cop. They're doing the same thing.

02:08 - It's the same exact mind state, the same exact process. And they too are reaching out for a lethal agent. In their case, it just happens to be a law enforcement officer. In other words, they're inducing the off officer to kill them on purpose in many cases, quite clearly. So as I, as I documented the book, for instance, there are a number of incidents in which someone has written a letter in advance to the officer. They don't know yet which officer it'll be.

02:41 - So they're not making a specific note, but they're saying something along the lines of, you know, to whomever I induce to kill me, I'm so sorry. I, I, I'm very, very sorry that it came to this. Those kinds of letters, they're really common and they make it crystal clear that these are, these are suicides. They're just, instead of using a direct method such as a firearm on oneself, it's just one step removed. Use using the officer as a method of suicide.

03:10 - I think we should add incidentally, that, that these incidents are very difficult for officers who are involved, very difficult. I mean, sometimes to the point of them having lasting over the course of years and decades, PTSD in reaction to them, it makes sense. They've killed someone that's very momentous. And so these are, these, this is a horrible tragedy for the people who are killed. it's also very difficult on the

03:36 - law enforcement officers. This one is really intriguing because the, you know, there is a, a narrative emanating, it seems to me mainly from the leaders of such groups, that this has nothing at all at whatsoever at all to do with suicide. They, they do promote that narrative. And, and in fact, I think it's their belief in, in some ways that this is, you know, not that at all, that it's a holy mission or, you know,

04:06 - some other motivation is at, is at bottom. But I, I've developed some skepticism about that. And then looking into the literature on it, my skepticism grew into just disbelief. that it's, that it's about anything other than suicide, for instance, if it's not about suicide, well then the perpetrators of suicide, terrorism, their, their histories, their own personal histories, as well as their family histories should look like anyone else. It should look like, you know, maybe,

04:38 - maybe other religious people, but not, not, they shouldn't look like suicide, decedents family history or, or personal histories. And yet they do, they, they, they do look like that. and there are other similarities as well. you know, my view of it has be, has become that, you know, even though the leaders of these groups, maybe the, the, the perpetrators themselves will, will say things like, this is not about that. This is about commitment.

05:07 - This is about religion, this, it's about justice. Those are, those are overlays on a suicidal foundation. I mean, just to your point about how intriguing these things are and also how they hit hard, I mean, I, I do think both things are very true. And the, the first thing is really, really important to, to, to emphasize because we're talking about life and death questions. We're also talking about a, a window on the meaning

05:34 - of life itself in a way. And for me, that's not the main reason to, to be, a suicide prevention researcher as I have been for decades now. It, but it is a main reason. The main reason though, is not that, it's that these, these incidents are killing people every day. And I would like to put a stop to that. That's the, but there also is interesting intellectual perspective

05:59 - and philosophical even perspective that one gains from pondering these, these things murder, suicide. I, I, I was certain that when I delved into it, there would be several deaths that were not of a suicidal character, but no, rather, where someone has, has perpetrated a murder per, perhaps they've done it, you know, on the spur of the moment, but perhaps they've planned it.

06:25 - And then because they have done something that they instantly or soon regret, they then form a plan for suicide. In other words, in that scenario, murder is primary. Murder was the origin point for that kind of process. And I was going into it, I was pretty sure that there would be several such scenarios, but I kept reading and kept reading and kept reading. And I couldn't find any like that. All of them were the, the reverse, if you, if you will.

06:55 - In other words, somebody becomes suicidal. Maybe for instance, they, they were, they were rejected by a romantic interest, and they spiraled down into a, a, a depression. And that depression had a suicidal element, and they started to think about suicide. And then at some point in the thinking process, their thoughts were along the lines of, wait a minute, this, this was, I didn't do this. She did it to me

07:25 - because of him, perhaps some other, you know, romantic rival or something. They, if I'm gonna die, they should die too. That's only the right and just thing that kind of thought. And I actually wrote a book several years on this called The Perversion of Virtue. And, and I, I, I take this point up again in this, this new book, called The Varieties of Suicidal Experience, where I make the point that even though I was open to that possibility that

07:54 - that murder would be primary, I could really find no evidence that that hardly ever, if ever occurred. And, and rather all of them were these suicidal scenarios that that morphed via a perversion of virtue. In other words, you know, the person, to the person, it feels like the right thing, the just thing, sometimes it's justice that's perverted. Sometimes it's mercy that's perverted. But in one way or another, some virtue is, is embraced

08:23 - by the person, the suicidal person, person, and they pervert it, and then they start thinking that person needs to die too. 'cause that's the right thing to do. That's what I think applies to all if, you know, most, if not all murder suicide incidents. And I, I I, I expand on that idea in, in the varieties of, of suicidal experience. I incidentally, I've stolen that title as I point out in the book.

08:53 - or, you know, maybe more, you know, kindly to me, I've, managed an homage to somebody that I really admire. And it's, it's the great William James who wrote a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. And I'm, I'm just using that same title, but I've changed one word. and the two efforts actually do have something in common in that James was trying to point, at least in part of the work, to commonalities that are,

09:21 - that are at bottom there, regularities commonality that are there across different kinds of religious thought and tradition, somewhat similarly, I'm looking at different forms of violence and arguing that all of them underneath at bottom are suicidal in origin. You know, I've developed a model of suicide. I did this, I have been doing this, and still am doing this over the course of, of decades. And the idea is that there, there are, there's a

09:50 - one thing we should acknowledge right off the bat is that, is that suicide decedents, people who have died by suicide, they're people. And so they have the, the same kinds of uniquenesses and dignities and, and lives and problems as people and, and just like people do, they differ from one another. They're different in their experience, they're different in their beliefs and their values, and they're, they're different in their demographics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

10:18 - There's a lot of variability between suicidal, decedents, those who have died by suicide, that is one can take that variability and, and expand it into such complexity that explaining suicide seems hopeless. And there, there is a line of thought on that, that's current. I, I reject that line of thought because I, I do think it's complex, and I do think there are irregularities and,

10:50 - and commonalities in the suicidal mindset. What I've pointed to as commonalities are things like the idea that what you're doing is, is better. It's just better for everybody. It's just, it's just the right thing to do for a variety of reasons, reasons everybody will be better off with, with you gone. That, that, that mindset, you can see how that would be facilitative of, of suicide. another regularity that, that occurs, you know,

11:17 - recurs across death, across incidents is the, is the belief that one is hopelessly, you know, alienated or, or disconnected socially, from others. Now, this is not a new idea that Durkheim actually talked about this in the 18 hundreds, and people before him have talked about it, but I think it's because it's a key and obvious regularity in the suicidal mind that it's come up across centuries now and then this one has not come up much across centuries.

11:48 - And this is a novel insight of this theory, though, once you think about it, it's so obvious, and the, the insight is that suicide's hard to do. It involves actually staring death in the face and not flinching. Most people are simply not capable of doing that, understandably. And naturally enough, we have self-preservation instincts wired deeply into us as do creatures, the, the world over. Of course, it's hard. And of course, many people who

12:19 - have the desire, the genuine desire, of course, they flinch or back off at the last incident, it only makes sense. But that, that idea so obvious once it's stated, had not been articulated very well previous to my work on my, my model of suicidal behavior. Those are the regularities that I think apply to suicide. And because I think things like suicide, terrorism, murder, suicide, even, although this one's sensitive and, and controversial and quite debatable, physician-assisted suicide, if those all are suicides,

12:54 - well then the same regularity should apply to them, namely, that they feel like they're a burden, they feel like they're alienated and they have a kind of fearlessness of death that is unnatural and that most people just don't, don't have to prevent them. These are, these are horrible atrocities, horrible tragedies in, in many cases, completely in, you know, innocent strangers are, are, are horribly murdered in, you know, for instance, in, in murder, suicide and,

13:24 - and mass murder, suicide. In instances that's the case. And suicide, terrorism, that can be the case. But even if it weren't, even if, if, if, you know, one person is, is killed, it's a horrible tragedy. It means not only the loss of that person's life, but the, the effect on family and others, not just for months or years, but for decades. And you could even make the case across generations. It, it's, it really does have a, a scarring effect on,

13:56 - or can have a scarring effect on people. there's just, there's just an endless number of reasons to prevent something as egregious and tragic and sad as this. And, that's the main reason for the work. And, you know, it's just, it is the priority. It's the only thing I really care about professionally. I really don't care about my model of, you know, so if there's another route to the lowering of the suicide death rate in the United States,

14:28 - but not just there, the world over, if there's a lowering of that by any means, I'm all for that. That's my, that's my main priority professionally, and I've got a lot of hope about that mainly because of our young people. I, I, I have people coming into my PhD program who are in their twenties. I'm their major Professor. I direct to work, and then they go out from here and their professors themselves now, I'm so proud

14:56 - of them and they're the future. And, and so I have a lot of hope that that generation and the generation that they train will make progress in bringing these rates down.

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