The implications of viewing the decision to kill oneself as a rational choice, based on an analysis of the costs and benefits, were explored. Suicide is but one symptom for an individual in distress to choose, and if suicide is prevented, other symptoms may appear in its place. Similarly, a critical question to be asked in suicide prevention is whether restriction of the availability of one met...

I HAD BETTER BEGIN BY CONFESSING that I am not an enthusiast for rational choice theory (hereafter RCT). It is not uncommon for devotees of RCT to suggest that it provides a quite general tool for understanding human behaviour, and should largely supersede traditional historical, cultural, and related theoretical approaches. While I am happy to acknowledge that RCT may provide a useful set of t...

Rational choice theory is pragmatically used by mainstream economics to explain and defend the existence and behavior of prevailing social and economic institutions as being optimal. Every deviation in actual individual and institutional behavior from the optimum is attributed to imperfections in the agents’ ability to pursue the optimal actions rather than the implausibility of the underlying ...