What is Passive Suicidality?

From: Healthy Gamer with Doctor K.

There are two types of Suicidality.

1)    Active suicidality - Thinking about killing yourself with the plans, the means, and the intention

2)    Passive suicidality

Passive suicidality feels that, it's just that if I went to sleep tonight and I never woke up I would be completely fine with that.  It is a complete absence of a desire to live.  It is not that I want to kill myself, but that's like, if I got hit by a meteor, like no big deal.

Issues like addictions and burnout have a root cause of passive suicidality. It’s an apathy about life. 

What I really call passive suicidality is like these people who just fast forward their life.  For them, time is not a resource to be used. It's something to be gotten through.  The goal is to hit the fast forward button on life until something happens

“Nothing good will happen in my life because I am not in control, so I will just watch online videos and play games”

They've fundamentally given up on the concept that life is something to be treasured and valued and something that can give you joy.

Why does someone think this way? Well, because it's true for them.

People learn from their experiences. This is their experience of life.They’ve tried education, dating, getting into shape, positive self talk, all that stuff.  It’s gotten so they just feel, “What’s the point?” They just keep getting bad things happening to them

It’s easy to be hopeful about life when the work you put into life, gets you something in return.  It’s way harder to be hopeful about life when there’s nothing to hope for.

The sheer volume of rejections that the human mind experiences these days is like 100 to a thousand times what the human brain was evolved to handle.  Each time we get rejected by a person or job application, that affects us.

Passive suicidality happens when the brain makes a calculation about the future, and finds that the trend is going to be downward.

The brain is very good at making calculations.   “Okay, do I need to go to the bathroom right now, or can I wait until I get to the gas station?”  “How far is the restaurant?”

The number one cause for passive suicidality is when we see a stable downward trend.

The brain doesn’t see a way forward.  There is a way forward, but you just don’t see it.