Understanding the perceptions of people who commit suicide is a sensitive and crucial scientific challenge. There are circumstances where people feel the need to leave something written, a note where they express and register their last thoughts. Our work investigates 139 genuine suicide notes, reconstructing the cognitive and emotional states of people who committed suicide. Our cognitive network approach enables a quantitative analysis of the language of suicide notes through structural balance theory, semantic frame theory and emotional profiling. Our results indicate that connections between positive and negative concepts give rise to a degree of structural balance that is significantly higher than in a null model where the affective structure is randomized. Hence, suicide notes are affectively compartmentalized and positive concepts tend to cluster together. Positive words are also central in the overall network structure (see Figure 1, left). A key positive concept is “love”, which integrates information relating self to others in ways that are semantically prominent across suicide notes. The emotions populating the semantic frame of “love” combine joy and trust with anticipation and sadness (see Figure 1, right), which can be linked to psychological theories of meaning-making as well as narrative psychology. Our results open new ways for understanding perceptual shifts in suicide ideation and inform future research on suicide prevention.
