https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/despair-friendship-suicide.html
I am not generally a fan of David Brooks' writings. But this is a moving and frustrating story of his unsuccessful efforts to help a depressed friend who ultimately committed suicide. It reminded me of a tragic event that happened during my junior year at College.
That year, I lived in the same dorm as a senior named "Amy." A mutual friend, "Sally," urged that I reach out to Amy and get to know her, as we had various common interests, and both of us could use some additional friends. Absorbed with other matters, I blew off Sally's suggestion.
During the rest of the year, I occasionally interacted with Amy, though we didn't really get to know each other much. She seemed somewhat unhappy and aloof, but otherwise normal.
Shortly after graduation, Amy took her own life. As an elite college graduate with a strong academic record, she had a bright professional future before her. She would have had every opportunity to improve her personal life, as well. If she didn't like the people at Amherst, starting a new post-college life could enable her to find a more congenial peer group. But Amy’s despair was so great that she likely didn't see things that way.
That summer, I asked Sally whether I was at fault for ignoring her suggestion. Had I reached out to Amy as she urged, maybe things would have turned out differently. Sally responded that Amy was so depressed that it wouldn't have made a difference. She went on to say that Amy's suicide might have been for the best, as there was no way she could ever be happy. Unlike me, Sally was known for her kindness and sensitivity. But in this case, she didn't mince any words!
Sally unknowingly anticipated Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker's rational choice theory of suicide, which posits that people do it if they expect that their life will be so bad, that it will have negative utility (more pain than happiness). In such cases, a person can literally be better off dead (at least from a utilitarian perspective). Perhaps that is what happened here. But it's hard to believe that a person with such a bright potential future was truly doomed to misery.
I later discussed the issue with another mutual friend, "Bob." He said various people had tried to reach out to Amy that year, and she had blown them off. In Bob's view, there was no helping a person who didn't want to be helped.
Bob and Sally may well have been right: It's unlikely I could have succeeded here, where more sensitive people had failed.
But we can never really know.
In later years, I went through a few bouts of depression of my own (nowhere near as serious as Brooks' friend or Amy). I too found that experts had little in the way of useful advice. Neither talking about the problem with specialists nor taking Prozac (a popular antidepressant) had any useful effect. I eventually overcame the situation by perservering and (partly) solving the problems that had led me to be down in the first place.
But the story of Amy still occasionally bothers me, when something reminds me of it. And If Brooks' account is accurate, we aren't much better at dealing with these situations now, than was the case back in 1994.
Note: As you have probably guessed, "Amy," "Bob," and "Sally" are NOT these people's real names. For reasons that should be obvious, I used pseudonyms.