Depression and Suicide

Abstract

<p>This chapter discusses the probabilistic and normative relationships between depression and suicide. After preliminaries, I lay out the clinical and mood-based understandings of depression and provide a brief overview of the statistical facts relating depression to suicide. Then, I discuss the normative relationship between depression and suicide. As I explain, the nature of that relationship turns crucially both on one’s view about the badness of death and one’s view about the nature of agential well-being. I canvass two accounts of the badness of death and three accounts of agential well-being and highlight some ways depression can affect the prudential rationality of suicide on each account. I consider the possibility that an agent’s experience of depression can simultaneously rationalize suicide and interfere with the agent’s capacity for rational choice and close by comparing depression with other conditions that exhibit a similar normative structure.</p>