30 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
T
he first time Kees van Heerin-
gen met Valerie, the 16-year-
old girl had just jumped from
a bridge. It was the 1980s and
van Heeringen was working as a trainee
psychiatrist at the physical rehabilita-
tion unit at Ghent University Hospital
in Belgium. As he got to know Valerie,
who’d lost both legs in the jump and
spent several months at the hospital, he
pieced together the events leading up to
the moment the teenager tried to end
her life, including stressful interactions
with people around her and a steady
accumulation of depression symptoms.
Va n Heeringen, who would later
describe the experience in his 2018 book
The Neuroscience of Suicidal Behavior,
says Valerie’s story left a permanent
impression on him. “I found it very dif-
ficult to understand,” he tells The Sci-
entist. He asked himself why anyone
would do “such a horrible thing,” he
recalls. “It was the first stimulus for me
to start studying suicidal behavior.”In 1996, van Heeringen founded
the Ghent University Unit for Sui-
cide Research. He’s been its director
ever since, helping to drive scientific
research into the many questions he
and others have about suicide. Many of
the answers remain as elusive as they
seemed that day in the rehabilitation
unit. Suicide rates are currently climb-
ing in the US and many other countries,
and suicide is now the second lead-
ing cause of death among young peo-
ple globally, after traffic accidents. The
World Health Organization recently
estimated that, worldwide, one person
ends their own life every 40 seconds.
(See Sidebar on page 37.)
Suicide is as complicated as it is tragic.
Suicidal behaviors come in many variet-
ies, ranging from suicidal thinking, or
ideation, to suicide attempt and comple-
tion, all of which may be associated with
various levels of violence or intent. The
behaviors themselves differ in incidence
among genders, ethnicities, and otherdemographic categories, and almost
always occur against a background of
depression or some other mood disor-
der—although only a fraction of people
with mood disorders become suicidal.
No field of scientific inquiry can sin-
gle-handedly untangle a phenomenon as
complex as suicide. But van Heeringen
and many other scientists are hoping
to shed light on the problem by dig-
ging into the neurobiological processes
underlying thoughts about ending one’s
own life and attempts to do so. This
work is building support for the idea
that suicide is tied to specific biochemi-
cal changes that can be measured and
targeted independently of, and possibly
in parallel with, the mental health dis-
orders they often accompany. Findings
from this work, researchers hope, could
help reveal new treatments, and perhaps
even opportunities to identify the people
most at risk in time to intervene.
“The knowledge we have today is way
larger than what we had twenty yearsCan neurobiology shed light on why people end their own lives?BY CATHERINE OFFORD