‘What Destroys a Person When that Person Appears to Be Destroying Himself?’ Intrapolitical Discourses on r/SuicideWatch

Passive suicidality is endured by 1 in 10 adults, yet remains understudied. Critical suicidology implicates oppressive societal hierarchies and cultural scripts in undermining human worth intra-psychically. The internalization of these systemic, “intrapolitical,” drivers of hopelessness may represent a key pathway to suicidal ideation. We fine-tuned theoretically grounded pretrained BERT and DistilBERT models to detect expressions of perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, self-hatred, and loneliness among 163,498 r/SuicideWatch posts spanning 2021–2022. Embracing a radically reflexive methodology, which highlights and interrogates investigator subjectivity amid the act of knowledge creation, thematic analysis among a 988-post subset isolated potential psychopolitical, or policy-contingent, determinants of suicidality: impossible expectations of accomplishment, physical beauty, and self-mastery; self-convictions of undeservingness of life, futurity, and emotional support; and the negligence and collapse of traditional caregiving institutions. Modeling post authors’ own comments as text covariates using TF-IDF representations, intrapolitical posts were shown to elicit lesser aggregate positive sentiment across their 569,959 direct-response comments. Nevertheless, these supportive dialogues often demonstrate implicit anti-suicidist practice, rejecting pathologizing lenses and acts of silencing, as an r/SuicideWatch-specific injunctive norm. We discuss the implications of over-specified theoretical subconstructs challenging the distributional hypothesis, and share insights and tensions surfaced during reflexive interrogation.