The means - prescription drugs, access to firearms, bridges without prevention methods - play a much bigger role than any emotions or thought processes.
In the 19th-century, French researcher Emile Durkheim calculated the ideal temperature for suicide: 82 degrees Fahrenheit. It was his compatriot Albert Camus who, a half-century later, then asked not under what conditions people kill themselves, but why. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," he said. "And that is suicide."
While the science behind suicide research has certainly improved since Durkheim and Camus' times, the quest to understand the phenomenon is still two-pronged, a question of both how and why.
What must go so wrong that someone would fight against every survival instinct, every ounce of biological drive to end their life? Why did 40,000 Americans kill themselves last year, the most in recorded history? How has - as a new study published in January by JAMA Psychiatry revealed - suicide become not only the leading cause of "injury" death in America but also the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 49, now surpassing even cancer?
Suicide stems from four feelings that coalesce to make a deadly cocktail, according to a new theory by Thomas Joiner, a professor at Florida State University, as presented in a comprehensive article in The Daily Beast last year. The equation is made up of Thwarted Belongingness ("I am alone"), Capability ("I am not afraid to die"), Perceived Burdensomeness ("I am a burden"), and Desire, according to Joiner.
Comment: The government sure are embarrassed over this one! They'd better hope she doesn't plan on a daring escape from her highly secure jail.