Decision-making balance in suicide: an active inference account

Introduction: Suicide is a behaviour whose motivation is challenging to explain as it can neither be rewarded nor punished since the agent no longer exists. The conventional explanation is that suicide is motivated as an escape from unresolvable psychological pain. However, despite suicide's high availability, its rates are very low (about 0.014% in the US). This speaks to high ambivalence as an essential feature of the suicidal mind.Method: To explicate the ambivalence of the suicidal mind, suicide has recently been framed within the active inference framework (AIF). AIF appears to be appropriate for conceptualising suicide because it is a theory of choice behaviour under uncertainty that, in suicide, cannot be resolved or, validated by experience. Moreover, AIF is based on the free-energy principle, which is proposed as a principle underwriting the very existence of sentient systems.Results: In this paper, we frame suicidal decision-making as the balance between the expected free energy of survival vs. suicide action policies. Based on this frame, we develop intuitions about the dynamics of suicidal decision-making. These intuitions are then proposed as guides for future research into suicidal decisions as well as suicide prevention.