Quotes From "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide" By Kay Redfield Jamison

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. . Kay Redfield Jamison

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. Kay Redfield Jamison

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 Kay Redfield Jamison

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 Kay Redfield Jamison

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 Kay Redfield Jamison