What I believe about suicide is that people consider it when they are in incredible pain and they can’t imagine the pain will ever end, except if they are dead.
What causes this? You could claim it was a distorted view of the world. That is, that whatever the proximate cause is, it also takes something in the brain to magnify the significance of that event to make it of life-changing importance.
So maybe it’s the crash of ‘29. Maybe it’s your company going bankrupt. Maybe it’s the loss of a spouse to divorce. Maybe it’s being teased mercilessly every day. Maybe it’s feeling inferior to a sibling. Whatever. The mind takes that and magnifies it to a point where you can’t see an end to it and you can’t imagine ever being happy again. You can’t imagine a way of stopping the pain except for dying. So you do.
I can see it happening that way. But we’ll never know for sure what it was like to be inside that boys head. Then again, I’ve been close enough to that point that I really don’t want to think about it much. I just gave people a tour of my 8th floor window last week on another question. I don’t want to redo it.