[rdl]

Most of the people I know who have killed themselves (hrm...10 or so over the past decade?) were not involved in startups in a senior role. One had sold a successful company a year or two before, and another was a senior engineer at a fairly successful tech company, and of course the other was aaronsw (who was involved in non-profit, activist stuff; it would be hard to say startups were involved in his death).

If you excluded people with depression from startups, I don't think you'd meaningfully change the suicide rate, but you probably would reduce the number and quality of startups. IMO, if one's internal emotional state is relatively independent of the outside world, it's not so much that losing a client or having a startup fail will lead to suicide, but that depression/withdrawal/etc. will lead to the startup failing.

The question is more can depression and startup success coexist.