[ascuttlefish]

Assuming of course that there are no specific reasons unrelated to money that could drive people to blackest despair. That a person is rich and famous is likely to be, in my humble and unexpert opinion, tangential to the problems that might make them suicidal. The tendency toward suicide is too complicated to generalize to a point about riches, I think.

[keefe]

Riches and suicidal problems aren't orthogonal issues. If you have enough money, then there are no external checks on your behavior. This allows negative traits to expand and if the wealthy person does not have a high enough level of reflectivity to self modify, then in many cases negative traits lead to internal dissonance and self destructive behavior.

[ascuttlefish]

That is definitely one of many ways a person can self-destruct, and it is indeed related to being wealthy and perhaps famous. But there are other motives that could explain suicides that don't involve money. I'm not saying they suicidal tendencies and wealth orthogonal (disclosure: I had to look that up :), but they're not always, uh, parallel either. Say for example you have someone who's been heavily goal oriented their entire life, but when they achieve their goals--of wealth and fame, or maybe just to be a hell of an entrepreneur, or something that has a side-effect of wealth and fame--they are completely unprepared for the emptiness and lack of purpose they now face. It could be argued that they face a despair unrelated to their wealth and riches but rather to the way they structured and lived their lives. (There's some interesting passages in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest about this.)

I don't disagree with you w/r/t wealth being a possible contributor to the motivations for suicide, but I believe that there are as many reasons a person could kill themselves as we can imagine, only some of which might involve their richness and famousness. Suicide is a dark, multi-tentacled thing.