Performance Escapes and Catastrophes

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of newer thinking about how suicide risk fluctuates over time using concepts informed by mathematics, which provides a useful model for understanding why and how suicide emerges in different ways for different people at different times. It focuses in particular on the implications of this perspective for understanding suicides that emerge suddenly or “out of the blue” without much advance notice or warning signs. In the world of dynamical systems, sudden and discontinuous change processes are often referred to as “catastrophic” change because they represent a fundamental shift in how a system operates. Catastrophic change can be so dramatic that it defies reason and cannot be easily anticipated. The chapter then considers the cusp catastrophe model, which stands in contrast to the unidimensional suicide-risk continuum model that has dominated thinking about suicide risk for decades.