Ethology and suicidal behaviour

Abstract

It is over 40 years since initial reference to ethology was made in regard to suicidal behaviour. In the 1950s, tentative analogies were drawn from the then new principles of ethology, following which there were several theoretical formulations based on general clinical observations of suicidal subjects. However, only in the last 20 years has experimental work on animal behaviour provided an ethological perspective on what is, in essence, the link between early psychodynamic hypotheses and biological formulations of suicidal behaviour, hypotheses which had at times been regarded as mutually exclusive. This chapter traces the development of ethological hypotheses and then refers to recent biological observations, the experimental manipulation of behaviour in animals and also findings from naturalistic longitudinal cohort studies, each of which may contribute to a better understanding of the enigma of suicide.