This essay is on the topic of suicide. Follow your heart and don’t read it if that’s going to cause issues for you.

Tarsiers (Tarsiidae) are adorable, weird little cunts that live in Southeast Asia. Unlike most of the other animals I’ve written about, they’re a family, not a distinct species. There are a few different genera, the largest of which, Tarius, has twelve species. The Tarius genus is found through the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The other two species are found in the Philippines. The Sulawesi species are endangered, while the Filipino duo are mostly unthreatened. Indigenous Indonesian names for the tarsier include bunsing, lakasinding, siling and tumpara. In the Philippines, Visayan languages call them mawumag, while in Waray they’re magô.

Tarsiiforms evolved around 45 million years ago; since then, the primary change they’ve undergone is that they’ve gradually gotten smaller and smaller. Most tarsiers’ bodies are 10-15cm long, with tails around 20cm. That’s pretty small for a mammal, especially a primate. Their eyes are the biggest part of them, at 16mm in diameter. In some species, their eyes are bigger than their brains. Like humans, they don’t have a penis bone. That’s not strictly relevant, but it is true. It’s important to find points of commonality with our cousins.

There’s another behaviour we share with tarsiers; one that far fewer people really know how to talk about.

When tarsiers are extremely stressed, they start to bash their heads against things. This is a behaviour to which I can personally relate: one sticking point of autism is that bashing your head against hard surfaces genuinely feels awesome. If a tarsier is stressed for long enough, it will hit its head until it dies. The intentionality of this is contested, but the result is the same. This means that as far as we can tell, tarsiers are the only non-human animals to frequently commit suicide.

Animal suicide is a very controversial topic. Some claim that it goes back thousands of years, to Aristotle recording an incident of a stallion killing itself after learning it mated with its mother. Like much of Aristotle’s writing, this is likely inaccurate, if only because animals have significantly fewer quibbles about incest than humans. Rough to air out that horse’s personal issues either way. I’m also hesitant to say that humans are unique in our suicidality. Intentionality is a significant factor, and something that is often difficult to comprehend in non-human animals. Animals that are generally agreed to have intentionality and self-awareness, such as crows and elephants, haven’t been widely observed as demonstrating behaviour that we humans recognise as suicidal. A great deal of this information comes from David M. Peña-Guzmán’s excellent article on the topic from 2017. He points out, as Emile Durkheim did before him, that suicide is an empirical phenomenon: it is caused by the conditions of reality. Unfortunately, humans aren’t that good at understanding the realities experienced by other species. We often can’t even figure it out among ourselves. If animals can commit suicide—and I personally believe they can—it may not be the same as human suicide. That’s fine. That’s just how species work.

The critical area for animal suicidality seems to be self-awareness; or, awareness of the conditions of one’s own existence. If the conditions of reality are bearable relative to what an animal needs, they’re not likely to commit suicide. If they’re unbearable and inappropriate, things start to go downhill quickly. Even before suicide, stressed animals are well-documented as demonstrating self-harming behaviours: feather plucking, fur pulling, neglecting to eat. I got to eighteen before I started pulling my hair out. Captivity is the primary cause of stress in tarsiers. The behaviour was first observed in zoos, where tarsiers were kept awake during the daytime and flooded by tourists taking selfies. It’s understandable that they’d start trying to kill themselves, honestly. As far as we know, they’re not that likely to bash themselves to death out in the dark, in the wild. Captivity is also a leading cause of stress in humans, even if that captivity is more existential. Captivity is not always four walls; sometimes it’s a lack of options.

Suicide is hard to pin down, even in humans. Is self-neglect suicide? When a dog stops eating while grieving a deceased owner, when do we consider that refusal to be suicidal? When a human animal abuses drugs to the point of overdose, when does that cross into suicide? Does a captive tarsier want to stop living, or does their baseline stress response simply result in death if it continues for long enough? How much does that difference matter?

When someone attempts or completes suicide, we are tempted to interpret every prior moment of their life as foreshadowing. Kurt Cobain’s death created a pocket industry of interpreting every Nirvana lyric to be a misinterpreted warning. We want everything to make sense There are, I think, two factors at play here. The first is that suicide is considered such an extreme behaviour that it swallows everything around it. Every other aspect of an individual’s life must be secondary to the primary, extreme act we now know them to be capable of. The other factor is guilt. At what point should we have intervened? What warning signs did we miss?

Peña-Guzmán suggests that suicide is a spectrum of behaviour. Like other spectrums, it’s one I’ve been exploring since I was very young. He rejects the notion that humans are entirely unlike any other animal, a framework that makes me trust him immensely. It’s fraught to give into the fantasy that we are fundamentally something beyond an animal. Humans are interesting animals, certainly, but we’re animals all the same. There’s a similar truth to suicidal behaviour. It may be an extreme behaviour, but it’s still just a type of animal behaviour. All human behaviour is animal behaviour. How self-aware do you need to be to know that existence isn’t worth it?

I am, by my own admission, perhaps overly comfortable bringing up suicide. Call it desensisation. I forget about the taboo. You never know who’s been affected by it, or how they might feel. But if we’re accounting for feelings, then I have to account for my own familiarity with the idea. Like tarsiers, I’m responding to the conditions of my existence. It’s not news that I’m in several demographics more vulnerable to suicide: autistic, transgender, broadly insane and disabled. Suicidality is not innate to these demographics, of course. It is innate to social failure to meet their needs. Still, there’s hesitant in talking about the role of unmet social needs in suicide. With my familiarity, I find this completely baffling. If it’s such a serious concept, then why not talk about it properly?

Discomfort is the brief answer. People don't like talking about suicide as a social phenomenon. Suicide as a medical problem is significantly easier to handle. To frame it clinically allows us to keep it at arms’ length. The reality of suicide is considerably messier. It’s more animalistic than we’d like to admit: the behaviour of something caged, driven to such extreme existential conditions that the only perceived option is self-annihilation. Humans crave something with more meaning: a moral failing, an entire life of tragedy, something consistent and grappable. But as the narrative arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice, nor does it favour coherence. When tarsiers bash their heads until they die, there's no grand narrative to be found. All you get is a dead tarsier.

I am kind of worried that this essay will trigger someone to send a welfare check on me. What, can't a guy write two thousand words about suicide without people thinking he’s going to kill himself? Can’t a tarsier rest its forehead against a branch without causing panic? Suicide tends to induce magical thinking: that either it’s solvable as a purely medical problem, or that even evoking the word will cause someone to Do It. The latter is behind a lot of censorship on social media. It’s a protective instinct, but at the end of the day most of what it does is drive stigma and reduce people’s ability to talk about these subjects. 

Suicide prevention in tarsiers is less complicated than with humans. Captivity, being kept awake in the daytime, and being around a lot of humans are the stressors that cause tarsiers to self-annihilate. The solution is not putting them in those situations in the first place. Easy.

For humans, it’s less straightforward. Suicide prevention as a cause sounds nice on a flyer, but actually doing it effectively is more much about economics than people like to admit. If suicidal behaviour comes from when an animal can’t survive its conditions, then suicide isn’t some beast we can slay. It's about the conditions of living. To figure out how to stop people from dying, we must ask what it takes for the human animal to live. The answers are often boring: shelter, food, social support. That's the thing about real suicide prevention: it's kind of boring. It’s about welfare policies, and social safety nets, and reforming mental healthcare. I grow suspicious of organisations that aim to prevent suicide without engaging with the above conditions of living. How does doing push-ups stop a tarsier from bashing itself to death? I dislike the framing of suicide prevention as similar to cancer, or heart disease: something where research will make a material difference. It’s dishonest to present suicide as a purely medical phenomenon. Medication can help, certainly. It can alternatively make things much, much worse. Either way, medication is only a little bit of the puzzle. Why, then, do we focus so much on research into suicide in public campaigns? We know the causes, and we know what needs to be done. What is lacking is motivation.

There’s more to tarsiers than their penchant for suicide. For instance, tarsiers have a mob mentality. When confronted with a larger predator, tarsiers will form mobs of up to ten in order to deter the threat. Organisation is often touted as one of humanity’s defining features, so it’s notable that our teeny, tiny distant cousins do it, too. They can turn their heads all the way to either side, granting them 360° vision. They’re the only extant primates with a purely carnivorous diet. They can climb trees and vines within hours of being born. Their potential for suicide is such a small piece of their lives. Just because it’s an extreme behaviour doesn’t mean it’s the only one that matters.

I hope that one day I’ll read this essay back and feel very, very silly. That the narrative of my life will bend towards coherence and I’ll be able to look at these years with clearer eyes, and laugh at how painfully earnestly I discussed suicide in abstraction. That's a dangerous thing to bank on, though. Hope may save us on a broad scale, but the more individual you get, the thornier it becomes. Resilience has, to me, always been more useful than hope. Suicide is a refusal to live. What has prevented me from going through with it is, ultimately, a stubborn insistence on living. All of evolutionary history consists of a stubborn insistence on living. Suicide is tarsiers is necessarily not the most significant part of them, because they still live. They’ve outlived everyone else in their infraorder. For my part, I’ve lived far longer than I ever predicted I would. Thinking about suicide hasn’t killed me. It helps, really. I’m obsessed with the why of everything. Why is this happening to me? Why does this keep happening to me? And then, the what. What do I need to do to survive? What conditions must I change to keep myself from going the way of the stressed tarsier.

I don’t have the answers to all of that. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have the solutions. Suicide is bigger than me, but it’s smaller than the taboo would have you think. Prevention is measured not in thought experiments, but in material safety nets. The answer always comes back to social policy. Sorry to be boring. That’s not the only factor, but it’s a huge one. If we want tarsiers to stop killing themselves, we change their conditions. If we want people to stop killing themselves, we also need to change their conditions.

It takes time, and effort, just like living. I can’t do it on my own. Suicide is an individual action with a collective solution. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep my own head bashing to a minimum.