Suicide as a possibility immanent to the Human Condition: A Philosophical proposal against the Phenomenal Reductionism of Psychology and the Biomedical Perspective

Abstract

Suicide as a human phenomenon has manifested itself throughout the evolutionary history of subjects without distinction of gender, race, age, culture, etc. That is why its approach has become a particularly utilitarian cleavage by the biomedical perspective and related disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry, especially in the historical and cultural framework linked to modernity. This approach assumes a phenomenal reductionism to the act of killing oneself as an event that must necessarily be prevented in today's societies due to the high rates of suicide and subjective discomfort. This is why both psychotherapeutic and pharmacological strategies fail to comprehensively and/or exhaustively cover the depth of the phenomenon, reducing its cause and manifestation to a purely instrumental logic. Considering the current context and the high rates of people who commit suicide per year worldwide, it is necessary to rethink the phenomenon in the light of a philosophical reading, proposing, apart from the technical reduction of medicine and science, a reading of self-annihilation as a phenomenal possibility of the essence of the human condition.