Toward a New Definition of Suicidality? Are We Prone to Fregoli's Illusion?

Subjects with Fregoli's illusion recognize a number of different people as differing in appearance, but they have the delusional belief that all of them are in fact the same familiar person (Sims, 1995). Do we suicidologists tend to behave as if we were experiencing this illusion when recognizing a number of our patients or clients, usually differing in cognitive and behavioral aspects of suicidality, as the same familiar person? Do we have a tendency to investigate, manage, or treat them as if they were in fact a single suicidal case? Are we consistent enough in defining suicidality in our cases? Is there sufficient external validity present in our definitions of suicidality? Can one's definition of suicidality be sent as a letter across the Pacific and be really understood as written when mailed or does the message in the bottle somehow get lost? Given the current lack of a widely accepted classification, this editorial proposes a new definition of suicidality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)