Many people are ambivalent about suicide. Often, they leave it up to others or fate to decide the outcome.

A young man, heavily medicated and discouraged, walks on the pedestrian side of the Golden Gate Bridge. “If someone smiles at me,” he writes in a note he leaves on his dresser, “I won’t jump.” The coroner finds the note in the man’s sparsely furnished apartment after his suicide. (1)

Behind her closed bedroom door, a teenage girl swallows a handful of pills. She doesn’t know if it’s a lethal amount, but she accepts whatever happens because she’s tired of suffering. If someone finds her in time, she’ll wake up in a hospital bed, no better than before, but no worse either. If she doesn’t wake up, her pain will be over.

Several boys play Russian roulette with a loaded gun that a boy stole from his father. This is a daring game of chance with potentially deadly consequences. None of the boys particularly want to die, but they share a bottle, come from broken homes, face a future that seems bleak, and see no point in living.

In 1975, a San Francisco psychiatrist, David Rosen, interviewed six survivors of the Golden Gate Bridge jumps. Rosen admitted it was a small sample size, but few people survived after jumping from the bridge. Rosen discovered that all six had several things in common. Each was young – under 30 and in most cases closer to 20. Each hit the water feet first and at a slight angle so that their bodies rose to the surface, preventing them from drowning. The most important thing is that everyone said they wanted to live as soon as they crossed the threshold. Plus, they didn’t have a plan B; it was the Golden Gate Bridge or nothing. (2)

I think people who post suicidality wanting to die is a way of writing them off before that happens, as if they no longer deserve to be considered. “Leap!” some observers shout at the man perched on the edge of a tall building. Let’s get this over with. It’s a cruel thing to say, and something that probably wouldn’t be said if the man was someone they knew and cared about. The fact that he is a foreigner makes what happens to him unimportant to many in the crowd. They share a certain fascination with his plight and wonder what drove him to the brink, but often that’s all.

Thinking that a person wants to die is often used as justification for doing nothing. If a person believes that someone who is suicidal cannot be dissuaded, or that it is their life and they can do whatever they want with it, including ending it, then intervention seems pointless . Just go about your business and let others worry about theirs without any thought or interference.

Whenever life becomes unbearable, death is an option, but that does not mean a person voluntarily chooses to die. Even people diagnosed with a terminal illness rarely resort to suicide. (3) Humans are not wired that way. From a very young age, we are taught to resist death for as long as possible. “It beats the alternative” is a common remark when someone comments on the tribulations of aging: life can be hard, but dying is worse.

If we are in pain, we want the pain to go away, and the sharper and deeper it is, the more we want to be free of it. If the situation gets really bad, death seems not only to be a viable alternative but, in some cases, the only option. This does not mean that people want to die. On the contrary, they do not want to live, at least as they live at the moment. We think that everything, even death, is better.