I’ve lost students and friends to suicide. While I understand your contempt, I think you’re missing a crucial piece. Sometimes people are in so much emotional pain for so long that they can’t comprehend anything beyond that–not won’t; can’t. Some people who experience depression get so exhausted dealing with it over the long haul that they just can’t keep going.
Example: one of my former students who killed himself was an extremely compassionate, caring person who loved his family dearly. He’d been struggling hard with severe depression for a very long time. Neither medications nor therapy helped. Eventually, he was too exhausted to go on. He chose to die where his parents would not be the ones to discover his corpse. He left them a long letter that included directions for first responders to find his body. He knew his parents would grieve hard, but he simply couldn’t continue. I’m still in touch with his parents, and they miss him terribly, but they never for one moment thought their boy committed a selfish act because they know he didn’t.
I’m not arguing that suicide doesn’t inflict pain on others. It does. I’ve experienced that anguish. I’m simply saying that viewing suicide in every instance as a supremely selfish act means an incomplete understanding.
I’m still angry at Brian Laundrie because he didn’t leave any information that would have helped the Petito family fill in the blanks that will always haunt them and because he emotionally and physically abused his fiancée. I’ll never respect him. But there’s a world of difference between Laundrie and all the others I’ve known who killed themselves.