No one knows how to deal with the matter of suicide, and no amount of citing this “study” and certain “statistics” can begin to grasp what it really is. When a friend of mine committed suicide a few years ago, people told me, “I am so sorry for your loss.” My loss?! How about his loss; how about how he had felt?! Suicide has nothing to do with those “left behind” by it – unless they’d had a hand in the causal conditions for it. It hardly helps matters that people use the term "mental health" when they mean mental illness: "the stigma of mental health," "struggling with mental health," "suffering from mental health," "raising awareness of mental health," "exploring mental health's dark impact," and so on. Wherefore this lame euphemism? Health isn't a problem, but illness is. If people so commonly can't even bring themselves to say, "mental illness," it must indicate something societally unspeakable. Similarly, men's committing suicide much more often than women hadn't been discussed much until women started giving talks about it – though in such cases, they'll discuss it in a way that ignores the realities of how different life is for men than for women, such as that men's lives are so much more solitary and expendable than women's are, and that men's feelings are devalued in favor of women's.
People will tell you, “Don’t kill yourself,” but they won’t ever offer any convincing reason for you to live. They’ll tell you, “Think of all the people you would hurt by committing suicide,” which ignores, and deprecates, how much you must be hurting in order to want to end your life, in addition to ignoring that you might not believe that anyone cares whether you live or would miss you. When you're feeling suicidal, the thing farthest from your mind is how killing yourself would make others feel. If anything, your are convinced that other people would be better-off without you, or not care that you're gone. You're certainly not about to let anyone know of how you're feeling or what you're contemplating. Their reactions are bound to be hostile, or callous, superficial or glib, which confirms that no one cares – as does being more concerned with "how it would make other people feel" than with how you are feeling.
They’ll tell you, “Just stick around for a while longer – things will get better,” or, “It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” but when things keep grinding on the same way, you feel left-behind by or left-out of life, and no one can tell you when things will improve and the pain will end, it only convinces you further that nothing anyone has to say makes sense. People will tell you, “Reach out to people who care about you,” but if there’s no one who cares about you, that sounds like sick sarcasm. “Reaching out” to others is futile. Some suicidal people are encouraged to go through with it by the insensitivity of others whom one would expect to care. If you do reach out to others, you find how little they really care about you, by their superficial or hostile responses to the idea of your committing suicide and how badly you are feeling. "What a selfish thing to do" = "How dare you feel so badly." The all-time most-insensitive thing to say is, "Don't talk about killing yourself – someone I know killed themself last year, and I don't feel like going through that again." How can you not feel even more consummately alone in how you're feeling? It is enveloping and absolute; there is nothing else; it is annihilating you; your friends are assisting it.
You’re reflexively, bluntly advised to “seek help” by calling a hotline or seeing a therapist, because the answer that our society poses for such a problem is in “more programs” and “better treatment,” rather than in examining and ameliorating the societal conditions that cause people to feel devaluated and empty to the point of ending by suicide the terrible pain imposed upon them, yet which is interpreted as a fault of character or an egregious imposition upon others – which results in stigma that compounds the shame and alienation over having suicidal thoughts and feelings. Every PSA about suicide advises people to watch for signs that someone they know might be suicidal – or to show others that one cares, when the fact is that no one really does. "I'd had no idea that he was feeling so badly," or, "I wish that he had said something," is what they might say after the fact, but why would a suicidal person want to risk compounding his own pain by opening-up to anyone?
I watched a young woman grieve over the suicide of her father, not having realized that he had felt so lonely and unwanted. After a month, though, she was able to give herself a pep-talk, in which she put her chin up by deciding that "I don't need him." But that was, of course, why he'd killed himself.