Suicidology’s Faulty Paradigm: Suicide Overrides Superordinate Impetus for Survival (“SOSIS”)

Suicidology has achieved little explanatory or preventive progress despite decades of intensive research. This article argues that the stagnation stems from a problematic but undeclared paradigm: that Suicide Overrides Superordinate Impetus for Survival (“SOSIS”). Across the field, suicide is routinely framed as defying a presumed instinct for self-preservation or some such life tendency—and, therefore, scientifically puzzling. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, this review shows that SOSIS has functioned as a disciplinary axiom and a conceptual prior but is rarely interrogated. Despite appearing a bioscientific principle, SOSIS is epistemically unfounded: the notion of a survival instinct collapses into tautology; the assumption that suicide entails its override constitutes circular reasoning; and teleological appeals to survival as evolution’s “goal” misrepresent Darwinian principles. The outlook is traced to, not bioscience, but a metaphysical, fundamentally extra-scientific intuition. The paradigm has channeled inquiry into fruitless searches for special predictors and suicidogenic mechanisms, while insulating the field from potentially useful inputs from mainstream life sciences. It generates a proliferation of derivative theories, without resolution, and inserts a prescriptive agenda into scientific discourse under the guise of descriptive inquiry. With SOSIS here identified as a contingent paradigm, rather than a biological truth, space opens for reorientation. A contrasting framework interprets suicidal behavior not as an aberrant breach of human nature but as an emergent outcome of a complex, evolved system. Progress in suicide science requires recognizing that the SOSIS paradigm operates, realigning conceptual foundations with evolutionary biology, and considering models that better explain human self-destructive behavior.