Judging from the newly allowed and frequent return of zobiie threads, it will be here when you are ready 
props to you if you can read it in Japanese, I read the English editions, published by Kodansha IIRC, and maybe still in print.
:smack: Damn, remind me to to post when I’m so tired.
I still say, though that the quotes you are bringing here are either (1) meaningless, as in quoting something from 40 years ago and claiming it to be an indication of current thoughts, (2) superficial, as in unsupported vague claims such as the Guardian quote “Suicide is sometimes even met with approval,” or (3) only reinforcing what I openly stated that in general, the people who are supportive of suicide here in Japan are the right-wind nuts.
Thank you to all those who posted the quotations from various official Christian documents showing that suicide is considered a sin, but there’s still something to be said here. Let me put it this way: I have met a lot of people during my life. The vast majority were from Christian backgrounds. Most at least vaguely considered themselves to be nominally Christian. Many were devout Christians. These people came from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, from the small town and farm dwellers that I grew up with to the people I work with who nearly all have college degrees and often have graduate degrees to the working-class, mostly black, Asian, and Hispanic residents of the apartment complex I live in. These people resided in all the various places where I’ve lived in Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Maryland.
In all that time, I have never met anyone who, on hearing of a suicide, said that it was a terrible sin (and certainly none who ever said that this person would be burning in hell because of it). No one. None. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Bupkis. The reaction has always been vaguely like the following: Of course, it’s a terrible tragedy when someone commits suicide. Of course, it’s not their fault. They had something wrong with their minds. Awful things had happened to them that made them unhappy. Indeed, if you were to say to the friends and relatives of someone who committed suicide that they were a terrible sinner and were now burning in hell, they would probably kick you out of their house for being so insensitive. You would be lucky they didn’t just beat you to a pulp for saying something so stupid.
These people do generally think that it’s terrible that someone might encourage someone else to commit suicide, and they do think that that is a sin equivalent to murder. There’s even a situation in which these people might consider suicide to almost be allowed. There have been numerous cases where someone, after being arrested for what might be considered a terrible crime, committed suicide in jail. Though they might not quite say that this was a good thing, there has been something close to a feeling among some people that maybe this person has solved everything by committing suicide before the trial. (I’m not sure what these people think of the case of martyrdom, since that’s pretty rare. I don’t know what they would say about someone sacrificing their life for someone else, but if they would approve of it, that’s another case where they might think someone could voluntarily give up their life without engaging in sin.)
Now, you may say that these people are engaged in huge acts of cognitive dissonance by refusing to think of suicide as a sin even though they consider themselves to be Christians and it is spoken of as a sin in official documents. I think many of these people would say that these official documents that speak of suicide as a sin are simply bad interpretations of Christian theology, since the documents try to understand suicide without a reasonable modern knowledge of how people think. I just don’t see that the vast majority of American Christians would consider someone who committed suicide to be a terrible sinner.
Knowing the SDMB, someone is probably now going to tell me, “How stupid are you? I’ve know lots of people who consider that suicide is a terrible sin. You must be really blind.” Look, suppose it’s true that somewhere out there, beyond everything I’ve ever experienced, there is a vast group of Americans who think that suicide is a terrible sin and will condemn the sinner to hell. What does that have to do with the OP’s question? Let me quote the OP:
> However, how would a mental health professional explain the suicide of an
> individual from a culture that does not condemn, and might even encourage,
> committing suicide in certain circumstances, or if the act was done in a manner
> to achieve a certain objective (i.e. martyrdom).
The OP is asking about mental health professionals, not average persons, and it’s even more unlikely that such people would think of someone who committed suicide as a terrible sinner. They would know about the effects of their mental problems and their unhappy circumstances on their acts. The fact that Americans are mostly at least nominally Christians isn’t that relevant. Posters to this thread have already pointed out that Japanese, despite having much fewer Christians in their country, also generally consider suicide to be a tragedy. Despite the differences in the religious make-up of the countries, the view of suicide isn’t that hugely different. On the average, the Japanese aren’t quite as disapproving of suicide as Americans and the suicide rate in Japan is higher than in the U.S., but the difference isn’t that utterly enormous.