Making Sense of Sylvia Plath’s Final Act
There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to... See more
Maria Popova • Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Knew I’d never see my twenty-fifth birthday. Am early for once. The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and
... See moreDavid Mitchell • Cloud Atlas: A Novel
He killed himself, as it seems up to 20% of people with bipolar disorder do