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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

Wallace was also intensely smart. To kill yourself as such an intelligent person is to be an implicit advocate for suicide. It is, inherently, a selfish move, and it is very unlikely he would not have recognized that.

I have struggled with similar issues my whole life. It is right to empathize with his depression, but it is just as disrespectful (in my opinion) to prescribe any thoughts to his suicide. Everyone experiences different aspects of depression and he was no different. In his world, the lack of opportunity or interest may have literally killed him.

I think it says much more about you to say that this judgement is unnecessarily harsh. Franzen undoubtedly loved his friend, even if they had a strange relationship through their passion for writing and Americans. I truly believe that this is, at least in part, Franzen's effort to pay respects to his friend.

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I think he articulated his thoughts about suicidal depression with incredible lucidity in Infinite Jest. This passage is etched in my memory. It haunts me and in a way I found it a bit of a relief that despite ongoing depression issues, I could not relate:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

It's nicely written. How do we know if there's any truth to it? Does it draw on research into suicide messages? Does it draw on interviews with people who survived a suicide attempt?

Suicide kills many people and while I welcome some discussion of suicide it's important to be aware of the stuff that tries to be truthy and the stuff that feels good.

It probably does draw on research. He had a lot of engagement with the mental health system. He suffered from depression. His experience with clinical psychology leaks into a lot of his writing.

Suicide as a consequence of diagnosed clinical depression is no more "a selfish move" than the fatal stroke that concludes a bout with metastatic cancer.

Thank you. I hear suicide referred to as "selfish" so often that I can hardly understand what it means.

Ascribing value judgements on people suffering from very personal diseases doesn't help and may actually prevent folks with suicidal ideations from getting help.

If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

> If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

Agreed, but this is very different from an objective analysis of why someone killed themselves.

No, the problem is that selfish moves are looked down upon. Ignore that all moves are selfish, at their root, but if you're acting purely to end your own experience without considering the consequences, that is by definition selfish.

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