I&#x27;m not a fan of this trend of presuming causes for suicides. The brain is an incredibly complex system with many failure modes, and some of them are just <i>weird</i>. You don&#x27;t necessarily posses the hardware to begin to comprehend what a particular suicide victim experienced, which is not to say you shouldn&#x27;t try, but humility is appropriate.<p>People project their pet social critiques onto the youth suicide rate. I&#x27;ve heard everything from high-stakes testing to too much Instagram to the rise of atheism to too little punishment. In the context of statistics this might be an appropriate national conversation. In the context of a specific person, speculation on a cause beyond what they&#x27;ve written is patronizing at best.<p>The only generalization I&#x27;m willing to make about a suicide is that the subjective experience of being inside the person&#x27;s head was excruciatingly painful for too long. This kind of pain is probably not a scalar quantity across individuals, so ideas of normal and abnormal tolerance for it may not even make sense. Perception of time is also subjective, so don&#x27;t think you can judge &quot;too long&quot; either. There is probably a 16-year-old who has struggled for 3 years with an experience that would have killed you in a week, just as someone has probably killed themselves to escape pain you would have considered trivial.<p>There may not <i>be</i> a truthy-sounding causal story for the origin of that pain, even for its victim. If they had one, even wrote it down, it might have been an explanation they latched on to but not the root cause, which may be as complex as the sum total of a lifetime of experiences or as banal as chemistry.<p>I hope that we as a culture can show some respect for the dead and the complexity of their experiences, and stop using them as soapboxes for our ideas of what&#x27;s wrong with kids these days.