Psychological Continuation: A Structural Viability Hypothesis for Relapse and Suicidal Transition Across Time Toward an Integrative Metatheoretical Architecture Linking Suicidality, Change Processes, Temporal Sequencing, and Psychopathology

Contemporary psychology offers increasingly precise accounts of regulation, cognition, relational functioning, therapeutic change, and meaning-making. Across clinical and developmental contexts, however, relapse, disengagement, and suicidal collapse can occur despite symptom reduction, coherent insight, or supportive relationships (Turecki & Brent, 2016). This recurrent pattern suggests an under-specified structural question: under what minimal conditions does psychological life remain enactable and viable across time? This paper proposes psychological continuation as a metatheoretical viability construct, defined as the joint availability of embodied regulatory existence, agentic alignment enacted under real conditions, and renegotiable futurity. The account is architectural rather than diagnostic or prescriptive and is positioned relative to change theories, process-based psychotherapy, and clinical staging (Hayes et al., 2019; McGorry, 2014; Wampold & Imel, 2015). Suicidality is examined as a boundary condition in which biological persistence may coexist with collapse of lived future accessibility (Shneidman, 1993). Continuation is further linked to minimal temporal sequencing across regulatory and dynamical systems traditions (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Kelso, 1995) and to a five-domain formulation of psychopathology as constraint configurations consistent with transdiagnostic and network perspectives (Borsboom, 2017; Kotov et al., 2017). The proposal yields falsifiable implications, including incremental prediction of relapse and suicidal transition beyond symptom severity in contexts where renegotiability remains constrained following apparent improvement. Psychological continuation is advanced not as a replacement for existing mechanisms, but as a candidate structural viability condition specifying when psychological processes remain enactable within a continuing life. Permissions NoticeThis work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Any use involving adaptation, modification, translation, educational deployment, therapeutic application, derivative modeling, or inclusion in external platforms beyond unchanged archival hosting requires explicit written permission from the author.