Everyone Has Good Cause For Suicide, Or

Each Way To Suicide Is Its Own: Intensely Private, Unknowable, And Terrible. Suicide Will Have Seemed To Its Perpetrator The Last And Best Of Bad Possibilities, And Any Attempt By The Living To Chart This Final Terrain Of Life Can Be Only A Sketch, Maddeningly Incomplete

It Is Tempting When Looking At The Life Of Anyone Who Has Committed Suicide To Read Into The Decision To Die A Vastly Complex Web Of Reasons; And, Of Course, Such Complexity Is Warranted. No One Illness Or Event Causes Suicide; And Certainly No One Knows All, Or Perhaps Even Most, Of The Motivations Behind The Killing Of The Self. But Psychopathology Is Almost Always There, And Its Deadliness Is Fierce. Love, Success, And Friendship Are Not Always Enough To Counter The Pain And Destructiveness Of Severe Mental Illness

I Decided Early In Graduate School That I Needed To Do Something About My Moods. It Quickly Came Down To A Choice Between Seeing A Psychiatrist Or Buying A Horse. Since Almost Everyone I Knew Was Seeing A Psychiatrist, And Since I Had An Absolute Belief That I Should Be Able To Handle My Own Problems, I Naturally Bought A Horse.

We All Move Uneasily Within Our Restraints.

Suicide Is A Particularly Awful Way To Die: The Mental Suffering Leading Up To It Is Usually Prolonged, Intense And Unpalliated. There Is No Morphine Equivalent To Ease The Acute Pain, And Death, Not Uncommonly, Is Violent And Grisly. The Suffering Of A Suicidal Is Private And Inexpressible, Leaving Family Members, Friends And Colleagues To Deal With An Almost Unfathomable Kind Of Loss, As Well As Guilt. Suicide Carries In Its Aftermath A Level Of Confusion And Devastation That Is, For The Most Part, Beyond Description.