When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.

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

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

Four thousand years ago, an Egyptian wrote out his despair onto papyrus in the form of a narrative and four short-versed poems. This document, now in the Berlin Museum, is thought by British psychiatrist Chris Thomas to be the first suicide note [...]"Death is before me todayAs a man longs to see his houseWhen he has spent years in captivity.

Parents also seriously underestimate the extent of depression in their adolescent children.

Violence and recklessness, profound social withdrawal, and self-mutilation are not, as we shall see, unique to our species. But perhaps suicide is.

Suicide, dangerously, has a contagious aspect; it has, as well, for the vulnerable, an indisputable appeal as the solution of last resort.