Personally, I have found a lot of wisdom on this subject in the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger. In it, Mr. Junger expresses his idea that, as we as a species (referring to humanity in general but the "developed" world and the US - Junger's home country - in particular) become increasingly more atomized and individualistic, we become lonelier and usually more prone to chronic negative emotion as an inevitable result. He essentially describes depression as our body's natural way of telling us that we are too distant from our tribe and that we must get back to them somehow. In a similar way to how, when you touch a hot stove, the pain in your finger is your body sending you a message that your hand is being damaged because it has come into contact with something it should not have and that contact must be broken as soon as possible. For most of our evolutionary history (civilization is actually a very new thing), being separate from the tribe usually meant death as no one individual could produce and acquire everything that they needed and also guard themselves from predators and other hostile hominids while they were sleeping so it makes sense biologically for our body to treat loneliness in a similar way that it treats the physical destruction of skin and muscle tissue (something which, if not addressed and stopped would also have generally resulted in death).
This makes sense to me and I suspect that the situation is particularly extreme for autistic people living in highly atomized and individualistic societies such as the US and Canada because we already have a natural tendency to be socially dysfunctional (for lack of a better term) and the negative results of those tendencies can be exacerbated by a larger societal tendency to be atomized and individualistic to the point of a pathology that causes healthy association and connection with other non-identical humans to become increasingly less likely.
I also think that Stoic and Epicurean philosophy can teach us a lot about managing our unrealistic expectations in life. Those of us who grew up watching Disney movies may have a conscious or unconscious expectation that love and friendship will come into our lives and remain there without us having to do anything other than "be ourselves," that true evil does not exist because it is just good people who are misunderstood, and that misfortune is an extraordinarily rare and unnatural occurrence in life which is almost always caused directly by some one-dimensional villain. This is unhelpful in my view because love and friendship require a great deal of effort and skill to manage in addition to usually requiring initiative (particularly if you are male - that's just how biology works), genuine evil does in fact exist and a person who believes it does not will have their world shattered and develop PTSD when they encounter it because they will be unable to process and fit it into their life philosophy, and misfortune is actually more the rule than it is the exception with most of life being a series of misfortunes for the majority of people who have ever lived (including us) which is punctuated in brief but highly enjoyable intervals of happiness and joy.
I tend to agree with the Stoics in thinking that, if we set ourselves to expect the impossible or irrational ("good things will happen to me without any significant effort, change, or sacrifice on my part because I am simply a good person and nature is purely good"), we set ourselves up for soul-crushing disappointment at some probably very inconvenient time in the future. I also tend to agree with the Epicurean assertion that ataraxia (a state of not being in pain or subdued by negative emotion) is most likely to be found within a small and tight-knit community of other people which Epicurus called "The Garden" but would, in eras prior to his, have been called a tribe.
I am not convinced that this necessarily means that we have to retreat into the remote countryside and live in small farming communities or join a mountain clan in Papua but I think there is a lot of good to be found in putting in the effort and time to learn social skills and create a tribe around ourselves. After all, most of the depressed people I have known, including myself, tend to articulate that the main things which are depressing them are loneliness, a lack of a life philosophy which accounts for the obvious and unavoidable misfortune and evil in the world, and a feeling that they are entirely unnecessary in a way they likely would not be if they were a member of a small group of other people who in some way counted on them to contribute something of value to the group.
To answer your question in a more contracted way, I suspect that suicidal behavior or at least ideation is probably inevitable for all but the most genuinely psychopathic individuals, who are for whatever reason neurologically incapable of experiencing anxiety, if we do not address the underlying root of our chronic negative emotion. Medication might sometimes be able to suppress that negative emotion for brief periods of extreme hardship and overwhelm until we are able to regain control but, as someone who was prescribed medication for anxiety and depression while in the army but who later decided voluntarily to quit taking it because I wanted to attack the root causes of my mental distress in a purely lucid and sober state of mind, it is my opinion that the underlying problems will most likely still persist until they are addressed because, if they were ever going to have reason to go away on their own, they would have likely done so already.
I do not at all mean this to say that we must simply "power through" and keep doing the same things we have always done but with greater intensity but rather that what we have been doing (our established thought and behavior patterns) are the root problem and that it would be wise to try to modify them in order to get different and hopefully more positive results. It absolutely appears to be the case that certain people, especially those on the autistic spectrum, are born with an abnormally high genetic predisposition to chronically experience things like anxiety, emotional volatility, psychoemotional overload, and suicidal ideation/behavior in the same way that certain people are genetically more predisposed than the wider human population to develop schizophrenia or become alcoholics. However, I personally think that it is also true that our thought and behavior patterns as well as lifestyle and environment play a huge role in determining how likely we are to be overwhelmed by these things at any point, which is in a way fortunate as they are largely if not entirely within our conscious ability to modify.
This is just me talking off the cuff and in the moment. I wonder how many others here feel the same way.
Last edited by Scipio on 29 Oct 2018, 3:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.
29 Oct 2018, 10:17 am
I realize now more than I used to that there are still a lot of good people in this world you just have to make the effort to find them. 
Sometimes we don't realize it because all we can see is the bad in this world.
