FWIW, not all suicide stems from clinical depresssion. While this may not relate to the OP, it does to certain posts in this thread.
According to this CDC page:
That means 86% of American suicides in 1999 were well past the “moody teenager” years.
Sometimes pain doesn’t come in the form of a trauma that mostly heals in a few years. Sometimes it stays for decades. Two quick stories:
I was suicidal at 15. Not a soul knew, and I was deadly serious. I was not clinically depressed. But loneliness and isolation were pretty much all I’d known since the age of 6, and it showed no signs of abating. So in the fall of my sixteenth year, as the chill continued, I slowly gathered my thoughts about suicide, because I just couldn’t deal with the loneliness much longer. This was not going to be a ‘cry for help’ suicide attempt; I was more afraid of failing, and having to face the ridicule of classmates, than I was afraid of death.
Fortunately, a miracle occurred before the inner discussion drew to a close, so I’m still here. But absent that miracle, I believe I was at most a few months away from ending my life.
An acquaintance, the younger brother of a close friend, committed suicide at 39. I’ve spoken about him before in suicide threads. I have no idea whether he was clinically depressed. His suicide note made it clear that he’d felt alone and isolated for many years.
His sister, who had been diagnosed as clinically depressed, and seemingly did make a career out of reaching out to others in her dark moments - his sister, my friend, is alive, despite traveling a much rockier road than I have. And whenever I think about it, I thank the Lord for every time she put aside her pride and called me in the middle of the night when she desperately needed someone to reach out to. She has long since made it through those times, fortunately.
She and her family believe that her brother saw the resulting melodrama, and resolved not to be that sort of burden on others. At any rate, he didn’t let a soul know, beforehand, that he was in any danger. And he is dead.
You can draw your own conclusions, and I know I’m drawing one from a too-small sample. But in retrospect, I think there’s something to be said for reaching out to friends, and being a bit of a burden on them. Sometimes the darkness of depression - or even the extremity of real life - stays around for years. And sometimes you need all the help you can get from every friend you have, just to stay around and make it through a long-term ‘temporary’ problem.
If someone is suicidal, clinically depressed or no, I hope they blab incessantly about it, that they make a career out of it. That they get professional help, and the emotional support of family and friends, even if involuntarily and grudgingly. Because the hole it will leave in the lives of family and friends if they suicide will dwarf the burden that they are while alive. Trust me on this one, please.
(this is not meant as a strawman but to emphasize a point I made earlier: whatever works for you is what you should do).