It's not a choice. It's not seen as a choice. The Choice is not between life-and-death but between suffering and ending your suffering. This is how the suicidal mind thinks. When suffering becomes greater than any other emotion it It's like a pressure that has to be relieved
"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
The problem with this analogy is that it, in life, any problem representing fire is going to change. Aside from terminal illness. Wallace didn’t have the perspective to see that.
I would have to agree with you, from personal experience. About 5 years ago I believe I might have overdosed by mixing OTC medication by accident, it was a combination of neurotropics and other focus medicine or at least after reflecting on the whole ordeal I believe this to be the case. I’ve never been one to consider suicide, never understood how someone could take their own life but at that specific moment in my life I felt that I was literally losing my mind and at any moment could go crazy and I would rather kill myself than to go crazy. So to touch on what you said, even a person that would never, ever do that under any circumstances within a sound mind can absolutely do it if the pain or suffering is so severe that killing one’s self is the only way one can save one’s self from what they’re going through.
I learned through that experience that the mind can be so fragile. My situation was induced from over the counter medicine. My heart goes out to individuals that have to deal with something like this due to mental disease… it really is something that affects everyone one way or another.