Kay Redfield Jamison

By December, Drew’s condition plummeted

“Suicide notes,” he writes, “often seem like parodies of the postcards sent home from the Grand Canyon, the catacombs or the pyramids—essentially pro forma, not at all reflecting the grandeur of the scene being described or the depth of human emotion that one might expect to be engendered by the situation.”

Each culture has stressed its own motivations for suicide. In classical antiquity, according to scholar Anton van Hooff, shame, grief, and despair were the primary reasons for suicide in young Romans.