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.

We know that the brain’s inability to think fluently, reason clearly, or perceive the future with hope creates a defining constellation of depression. We also know that depression is at the heart of most suicides. Neuropsychologists and clinicians have found that people when depressed think more slowly, are more easily distracted, tire more quickly in cognitive tasks, and find their memory wanting. Depressed patients are more likely to recall negative experiences and failure, as well as to recall words with a depressive rather than a positive context. They are also more likely to underestimate their success on performance tasks

study in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Asia has shown the unequivocal presence of severe psychopathology in those who die by their own hand; indeed, in all of the major investigations to date, 90 to 95 percent of people who committed suicide had a diagnosable psychiatric illness. High rates of psychopathology have also been found in those who make serious suicide attempts.

By the late nineteenth century in Europe, hanging and poisons were by far the most common ways to kill oneself in France, England, and Prussia; drowning was next in preference. Cultural differences, however, were significant. Firearms, for example, were quite commonly used in suicides in Italy, France, and Prussia but far less often in England, where a wide assortment of drugs and poisons—prussic acid, caustic acid, mercury, opium, laudanum, potassium cyanide, arsenic, vermin killers, chloroform, strychnine, and belladonna—was put to use