Among the Yuit Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, if an individual requested suicide three times, relatives were obligated to assist in the killing. The person seeking suicide dressed in ritual death garb and then was killed in a “destroying place” set aside specifically for that purpose. To save commonly held resources of food or to allow a nomadic society to move on unhindered by the physically ill or elderly, some societies gave tacit if not explicit approval to suicide.

In one study carried out in Australia, for instance, 40 percent of those who acknowledged thinking about suicide at one point in their lives, when asked the same questions four years later denied ever having had such thoughts.

Suicide, it can be seen, is the second major killer of women in this age group and the fourth major killer of men. By any standards, suicide is a critical public health problem.

Morbidly afraid of water, he then drowned himself in his swimming pool. Not too far away, consistent with a lifetime of dark humor, he left out a copy of the book Don’t Go Near the Water.

Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness. American artist Ralph Barton tried to explain this in his suicide note:

Disconcertingly, one of the highest-risk periods for suicide is when patients are actually recovering from depression.

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description.

Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born.

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.