On September 9, 2009, Dr. Sapandeep Sahni hanged herself after her pregnancy test came out negative for the fourth time. She had a daughter, but she and her family desired for her to have a son. It was culturally important. Otherwise, Dr. Sahni’s life could be seen as a success: she held a relatively prestigious job (a general practitioner), was planning to become an eye specialist, was popular with colleagues and patients alike, and was well off, living in a comfortable house (Schlesinger, 2010). However, this one particular failure seems to have led her to end her days. In what follows, we will try to make Dr. Sahni’s and other apparently unlikely suicides less obscure.

When we are confronted with a failure, we don’t want to face a mirror. We would rather be someone else, forget ourselves, and escape. The self becomes a burden, and our strongest motivation is to avoid self-awareness. One radical solution, that liberates us from our aversive selves forever, is suicide. The idea of suicide as escape has been proposed by a sociologist, Jean Baechler (1975), and further developed by Roy Baumeister (1990), who advanced a social-psychological theory of suicide as resulting from a motivation to escape self-awareness. Obviously, there are less radical ways of avoiding self-awareness, and we do not attempt suicide each time we fail. We usually turn on the TV or drink alcohol. Nevertheless, could failure and suicide form a mental association, such that when we fail, suicide comes to mind more easily?

Failure, escaping self-awareness, and suicide

Self-awareness is the state in which an individual becomes the object of his/her own attention (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Morin, 2004). In this state, you compare yourself to your standards: you assess the gap between who you are and who you ultimately want to become. This often yields unfavorable results, making self-awareness aversive. Consequently, people sometimes avoid focusing on the self when confronted with failure.

As an illustration, men who are negatively evaluated by an attractive woman tend to avoid listening to their own (recorded) voice (Gibbons & Wicklund, 1976). Naturally, other solutions are possible: reducing the discrepancy between the self and the standard by changing the self or by changing the standard. For example, if you fail to achieve your aim of being the single best professional in your line of work, you can try to improve by acquiring new skills (i.e., change the self), or become satisfied with being a very good professional, although not the best (i.e., change the standard). The focus of attention determines which one of these two solutions will be chosen. If performance is in focus, an attempt to change the self will be made. If it is the standard, it is more likely that the standard will be changed (Dana, Lalwani, & Duval, 1997; Duval & Lalwani, 1999). Nevertheless, when the failure is perceived as large and permanent and the standard as unattainable, escape will be preferred (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval, Duval, & Mulilis, 1992; Morin, 2011).

Building on these insights, Baumeister (1990) advanced a theory of suicide as an escape from oneself. In this framework, a suicide attempt is a result of an elaborate process initiated by an important failure or disappointment. When you blame yourself for a failure, you may end up in a state of emotional numbness and disinhibition (labeled cognitive deconstruction), in which suicide appears not only as acceptable, but as the only possible solution. This is when explicit suicidal ideation and planning of a suicide attempt occur. In his review, Baumeister (1990) provides numerous illustrations consistent with the idea that a failure to attain a given standard underlies many suicide attempts. For example, suicide rates are higher in countries with high rather than low standards of living (Argyle, 1987; Lester, 1984), and college students commit suicide more often than individuals of comparable age who are not in college (Hendin, 1982).

These findings seem counterintuitive – why would privileged environments produce high suicide rates? The apparent paradox is resolved if we acknowledge that high standards are likely to yield failure. If everyone around you is happy and successful and you feel miserable, you are likely to conclude that something is wrong with you. This is a first step in a suicidal process.

Recent evidence is consistent with this idea. For example, suicide is the most frequent in countries in which people are rich and happy (Chatard, Selimbegović, & Konan, 2009; Daly, Oswald, Wilson, & Wu, 2011). Surprising at the first glance, these results make sense if it is the poor and unhappy who commit suicide in “rich and happy countries”. These and other similar findings point to the fact that high standards of happiness, beauty, wealth, intelligence, or performance have a dark side – by fostering failure, they might drive some people to self-destruction.

Cultural standards and suicide-related thought accessibility

Everyone fails once in a while in comparison to some standard, and failure fortunately does not immediately prompt suicidal ideation and planning of suicide attempts. Recall that Dr. Sahni’s failure to get pregnant was the fourth in a row. Suicidal thinking is the result of an elaborate process, and occurs near the end of the suicidal spiral (Baumeister, 1990). However, without leading to suicidal ideation, failure to attain standards has been shown to increase the cognitive accessibility of concepts related to suicide (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011). The notion of “accessibility” was proposed by Bruner (1957), and refers to the ease with which an idea comes to mind. According to Bruner, motivational states can increase the accessibility of relevant concepts. Recent social-psychological theorizing closely echoes these decade-old ideas. For example, in Kruglanski et al.’s (2002) goals systems theory, when a goal is activated, it automatically makes accessible means to that goal. In a similar vein, in the Relevance of Activated Representations (ROAR) model (Eitam & Higgins, 2010), the activation level of a given concept is determined by its motivational relevance.

To sum up the theoretical bases, if failure increases motivation to escape self-awareness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), if suicide is a means to achieve that goal (Baumeister, 1990), and if motivation impacts construct accessibility (Eitam & Higgins, 2010; Kruglanski et al., 2002), then it follows that failure to attain a standard should increase suicide-related though accessibility. This does not mean that individuals consciously contemplate suicide and plan a suicide attempt after failure. However, it entails that concepts related to suicide should come to the fringe of consciousness immediately after a failure.

Our culture is packed with diverse standards of values that we try to achieve in order to feel good about ourselves. Advertisements on television, in magazines, or on billboards most often feature young, beautiful, slim, smiling (happy), rich, successful individuals. They convey the message that to be a valuable member of the society, this is how you have to be. Unfortunately, due to specific characteristics of some standards, societies, or individuals, these standards are often hardly attainable, and sometimes not at all.

Research on terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) has documented, that failures to match cultural standards can make death-related thought particularly accessible. In this theoretical perspective, self-esteem allows individuals to attenuate death-related anxiety. When this mechanism is weakened by failure to live up to cultural standards, death anxiety increases death-thought accessibility (Hayes, Schimel, Faucher, & Williams, 2008 ; Ogilvie, Cohen, & Solomon, 2008). In this view, however, increases in death-thought accessibility are motivated by the fear of death, not the desire to escape the self. Thus, TMT does not speak to the relation between failure and suicide-thought accessibility. Recent research complements current understandings of the effects of failure on cognitive functioning by disentangling the impact of failure on death- and suicide-related thoughts.

In Chatard and Selimbegović’s (2011) first experiment, participants completed measures of self-consciousness (chronic level of self-awareness, Scheier & Carver, 1985) and escapist motivations (tendency to cope with adversity by mental or behavioral avoidance, Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989). If the reasoning based on escape theory presented above stands, failure should make suicide particularly accessible for those high in self-consciousness and escapist motivations. Participants were then randomly assigned to three experimental conditions. They had to describe either how they would feel and what they would do if they were unemployed and poor (the failure condition), or if they lived in times of war (this condition was negative and related to death, but not to personal failure). Finally, in a control condition, this task was omitted.

Participants then completed a word completion task, assessing suicide- and death-related thoughts accessibility (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991). It consists of filling in the blanks in word fragments (e.g., B _ _ K) to form words (e.g., BOOK). Sixteen out of 24 fragments could be completed only as unrelated to suicide or death, but four could be completed as either suicide-related or unrelated (e.g., S U _ _ I _ E could be completed as SUICIDE or as SUBLIME; other suicide-related words were hang, rope, and vein, referring to the most common means of suicide in Europe, Värnik et al., 2009). Four other fragments could be completed as either death-related or not (mortal, coffin, grave, and decease). If suicide is particularly accessible, critical word fragments would be more likely to be completed as suicide-related than as neutral. Furthermore, if this is not due to an increase in the accessibility of death-related content, death-related completions should not display a parallel pattern. The proportion of suicide-related completions served as an indicator of suicide thought accessibility (and the proportion of death-related completions as an indicator of death thought accessibility).

As expected, participants in the failure condition showed greater suicide-thought accessibility than participants in the other two conditions. This result corroborates the idea of a direct link between failure and increased suicide-thought accessibility. In addition, self-consciousness and escapist motivations moderated the effect of failure, such that only those who had high scores on both of these personality characteristics reacted to failure with increased suicide thought accessibility as compared to the other two conditions. Death-related thought accessibility did not reflect a similar pattern, indicating that the increase in suicide-thought accessibility is not due to a more general increase in death-related content.

Another study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 2) yielded replication of the link between failure and increased suicide-thought accessibility in a country with high standards of living (Switzerland). In contrast, parallel results were not observed in a country with low standards of living (Côte d’Ivoire). In this study, Swiss and Ivorian participants wrote about unemployment (as in the previous study) or not. Importantly, unemployment is low in Switzerland and high in Côte d’Ivoire. Hence, it represents a greater discrepancy from the standard in Switzerland than in Côte d’Ivoire. Consistent with expectations, the idea of being unemployed increased suicide thought accessibility in Switzerland but not in Côte d’Ivoire.

In yet another study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 3), Swiss participants first reported their subjective happiness. They were then exposed to a newspaper article reporting that more than 90% of the Swiss declare being satisfied with their working and housing conditions and the balance between professional and family life. Once again, those who failed to reach the standard (i.e., the unhappy), but not those who matched it (i.e., the happy) showed an increase in suicide-thought accessibility. Interestingly, in this study, participants were reminded of something positive (high life satisfaction). It thus seems that even positive contents can bring suicide to mind (these results were conceptually replicated in the Czech Republic, Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 4).

As underlined before, people have ways to escape other than suicide, and if suicide reaches consciousness it is likely to be rejected as a “solution” (Shneidman, 1996). Some ways of coping include using substances that alter the state of consciousness (e.g., alcohol and drugs, Carver et al., 1989). If such behaviors serve the function of escape, then failure should increase the desire to use these substances. This idea was put to test in Chatard and Selimbegović’s (2011) fifth study, carried out with regular marijuana smokers as participants. They were asked to recall either their greatest failure in life (failure condition), or the situation that provoked their greatest anger (control condition). Importantly, both situations were negative, but anger was not expected to increase suicide thought accessibility. Additionally, participants were asked when they would roll their next joint. Results showed that suicide was more accessible and that participants intended to smoke marijuana sooner in the failure than in the anger condition.

The last study (Chatard & Selimbegović, 2011, Study 6) aimed to show that cognitive accessibility of concepts related to escape and relief increases under the same conditions as suicide-thought accessibility does. Young female participants first reported their body satisfaction (Garner, Olmstead, & Polivy, 1983). They were next presented either a slim top model (an unattainable standard, modified in Photoshop – failure condition), or a more realistic model (also modified in Photoshop – control condition), before taking part in a lexical decision task. Letter strings were presented one by one on a computer screen. Participants’ task was to indicate for each letter string whether or not it was a word. Among words, some were suicide-related, some were escape- and relief-related, and some were neutral. Response times were collected by the computer. The more a concept is accessible, the quicker the participants should be to identify a related word. Indeed, participants in the failure condition were quicker to identify escape- and suicide-related words than those in the control condition. This effect increased as body satisfaction decreased, and was not found on neutral words. Needless to say, participants’ body mass index indicated they were quite normal according to medical standards. Interestingly, suicide increased in accessibility along with escape-related concepts such as “calm” or “peace”.

Conclusions

Taken together, these findings show that failure to attain standards of value can make thoughts of suicide increasingly accessible. Furthermore, this effect is associated with a motivation to escape self-awareness, and is particularly strong when failure is important. Importantly, the observed pattern cannot be explained by an increase in death-related thought accessibility, and thus seems to be specific to thoughts of suicide. These results concord with theories of self-awareness and suicide as escape, as well as with recent theoretical insights about the cognitive underpinnings of motivation.

They have quite important implications and raise interesting questions. For instance, if death-thought accessibility reflects fear of death, as has been shown in TMT research, suicide-thought accessibility may reflect fear of life. Indeed, when one is confronted with the fact that (s)he does not match personal or cultural standards of value, (s)he may be afraid of living a life unfulfilled, a life of disappointment colored by self-dislike (Becker, 1973). Under these conditions, fear of death may be shadowed by fear of life, bringing thoughts of suicide closer to consciousness. Taking into account the existence of fear of life and studying the conditions that make it dominate human psychological functioning may complement our picture of fundamental human motivations.

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