Suicide and the Survival Architecture of Coping: A Model of Activation–Capacity Mismatch from Contemplation to Collapse

Suicidal crises are often framed as discrete events or as outcomes of diagnosable syndromes. The Survival Architecture of Coping (SArC) reframes suicidality as a system state: a late-stage manifestation of an overloaded regulatory architecture. SArC defines coping capacity as an interdependent function of four coupled domains—biological regulation (sleep–recovery and autonomic dynamics), cognitive flexibility (appraisal, set-shifting, inhibitory control), relational co-regulation (access to stabilizing interpersonal feedback), and existential meaning (future-oriented value and narrative coherence). SArC posits that acute risk concentrates when activation (subjective urgency/action-readiness), often accompanied by arousal (physiological mobilization), rises as deployable coping capacity declines, compressing attention, appraisal, and behavioral options. Activation and arousal often covary but are not identical: activation denotes urgency/action-readiness, whereas arousal denotes physiological mobilization that may be high (agitation) or low (shutdown) even when activation remains escape-focused. Integrating allostatic load, attachment-based regulation, process-based psychotherapy, and arousal–appraisal approaches (Passaro, 2025a), SArC describes suicidal experience along a continuum of load–capacity imbalance: low-load contemplation, matched-load engagement, excess-load narrowing, and overload in which shutdown or collapse may be experienced as short-term relief when other downshifts fail. The model generates within-person predictions—for example, that rising activation coupled with cross-domain loss of deployable capacity precedes near-term spikes in escape appraisal—and it motivates multimodal intensive longitudinal assessment (e.g., EMA paired with sleep and autonomic indices). Clinically, SArC shifts the immediate target from ideation suppression alone to restoring deployable capacity and reopening flexible regulation across body, cognition, relationship, and meaning.