Predictably I stumbled upon a topic trending some notes on facebook. I like to read as much as I like to write. But this topic is sensitive enough to warrant some care. Too many times have you seen arguments flare up through comments by different friends designed to enrage or just poke fun at a difference of opinion. 'Flaming' will not be my aim here.

The topic I've noticed is suicide, and, whilst I find merit in so many people's words and actions - both charitable and with the best intentions, I cant help feeling troubled. There is a stigma attached to it. 'A cry for help,' 'a sign of weakness,' 'a cowards way out,' 'they need our help...' and so on. The general consensus is always the same - it can not be allowed to happen. And whilst I agree that the continuing growth in suicide statistics in the UK is both worrying and tragic, I feel that the other side of the argument has - predictably - too small a voice that is mostly missing from the debate floor. We have so strong a desire for an anaesthetic for our loneliness that we dont always want to listen to the lonely. The irony is missed so completely. Campaigners will campaign heatedly, not always understanding how or why the phenomenon exists.

David Foster Wallace traverses the other side of the fence:

The so-called ‘ psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill themselves 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 him/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.

The fault I find is this. When you say it is wrong, that there's no excuse, that a person is at fault for how they perceive the world and how they feel... know that you may be alienating millions of people. Loneliness is the enemy?