Do you think that people who are not clinically depressed (or suffering similar symptoms as part of another diagnosable illness; e.g. hypothyroidism, hypogonadism, inborn errors of metabolism, (pre)diabetes, sleep disorders, Parkinson's disease, dementia) compose a substantial portion of people who experience suicidality? If so, can you identify any empirical evidence supporting that belief?
>Do you think that people who are not clinically depressed (or suffering similar symptoms as part of another diagnosable illness; e.g. hypothyroidism, hypogonadism, inborn errors of metabolism, (pre)diabetes, sleep disorders, Parkinson's disease, dementia) compose a substantial portion of people who experience suicidality?
Yes.
>If so, can you identify any empirical evidence supporting that belief?
It's common knowledge to mankind for millenia that most suicides are connected to real-world stressful situations and that there exist people that attempted them that were not suicidal before (and neither after they were resolved).
If you want the scientific version of this, it's called "situational depression", is commonly (1 in 5 sufferers or so) connected with suicidal attempts or obsession, and is described thusly:
An adjustment disorder (AD) (sometimes called exogenous, reactive, or situational depression) occurs when an individual is unable to adjust to or cope with a particular stressor, like a major life event. (...) Unlike major depression the disorder is caused by an outside stressor and generally resolves once the individual is able to adapt to the situation. (...)
That said, unlike most people in here, I'm with the anti-psychiatry school of people like R.D. Laing etc, and blame even "major depression" to irrational and ineffective ways of living and external conditions. I believe that's responsible for far more cases that are casually nowadays ascribed to chemical inbalances and such (mixing correlation and causation). In the same manner, I find that most kids don't need ADD drugs but it's mostly a nice racket to prescribe them.
Note that this doesn't make me unsympathetic to major depression victims (that I believe are not chemically imbalanced). If anything it's the opposite: not only they suffer from sensitivity to external issues and living conditions that are concrete and extremely difficult to avoid (short of changing the whole of society or their whole surroundings and life path), but they're also drugged and numbed to make them blend in and accept them.
I guess it's only fair that I reveal my bias here: I am deeply skeptical of people who claim to have a philosophical or political "answer" to "mental illness". In my experience, most such people seem to be utterly unfamiliar with the effects of unusual physiological states on the mind, and ultimately find their inspirations in the more flowery and idealistic schools of philosophy rather than in the scientific crucible of rationality and empiricism (neither is sufficient on its own: the two must be joined to make any sense of the world; this is, at any rate, my reading of Kant and his critics).
All that said, I'm a little confused by your invocation of "R.D. Laing etc". Usually, the name I see paired with R.D. Laing is Thomas Szasz, and I am far more receptive to the former than the latter. As far as I understand it, they had some pretty deep disagreements. Perhaps Foucault is closer to Laing than to Szasz, and you meant something closer to Foucault's formulation of mental illness, but I am less familiar with his ideas. I admit a certain reluctance to risk exposing myself to yet another flavor of pontification uninformed by experience (there are so many to choose from, and it seems that they uniformly exhaust my patience; I can only spare so much effort entertaining "learned" people who dismiss my lived experience as utter delusion).
As it happens, I was prescribed an ADHD drug by the same psychiatrist who ultimately urged me to pursue the physiological diagnosis whose treatment I actually found helpful. I found that the drug was only modestly helpful at best, and he was quite receptive to my assessment that I should discontinue it. I actually still have almost a month's supply in my cupboard, have felt no temptation to (ab)use it, and am not sure whether I should turn it in to the DEA (it being Schedule II, which is supposedly accounted with some precision) or quietly dispose of it in the bags of my paper shredder.
Foucault too, and the whole idea of mental illness as a societal construction (besides the verifiably clinical cases).
I don't see modern western medicine as a hard science like Math or Physics. It's the same "science" that touted lobotomy, electro-shock therapy (including for "gayness"), considered blacks inferior, overprescribed ADHD drugs, etc.
The problem with medicine, compared to physics, chemistry, etc, it's that its a huge business, the biggest on the planet so there's a huge monetary motivation for selling snake oil, and its procedures and practice were never formalized in a definite way nor are it's results as definite and verifiable as in physics, EE, etc, so it's also prone to fashion and fads.
Peer review by itself doesn't mean much if anything. Liberal arts journals (the kind Sokal published in) are also peer reviewed.
