I've seen a lot of comments, here and otherwise, with regards to Aaron's suicide with many of them trying to skirt the issue, or apparently not understanding the subject at hand in the slightest. Many of these being people seemingly believing that he didn't think anything through and as if his brain was a processors that received an execute command and simply followed through the actions. However, this post is one of the few that provides insight, a lot of insight into the minds of Aaron Swartz and others like him, and how he may have actually been thinking things through over the course of time. Suicide isn't a person jumping off a ledge it's someone standing at a ledge slowly being pushed off by a thousand little things behind them until they slip.
I was going to write this on the parent, but I didn't because I thought it was tangential. You have to realize this is my personal experience, but it speaks volumes.
The scariest, closest to suicide moment I ever experienced was when I was shopping at a mall. It wasn't very busy, and I was feeling very... manic might be the word. Head down, headphones in, speed walking between errands. I had to keep moving, no matter what. I noticed the sort-of cut-away in the floor, so you could see from the top floor down to the ground. It was only 3 stories, but I had a really strong, sudden impulse to vault over the railing and see what it would do to me. Maybe I could land on my head, that might work. It was something I had never really considered before, it wasn't a very efficient way to do things, but it just gripped me very suddenly and all of a sudden it was a huge crisis.
Being suicidal, generally, is death by a thousand cuts. You have a predisposition, and all the stresses in life push you in that direction (as you've said). But the jumping off the ledge moment is crucial; personally, I have strategies for daily temptations like putting away knives in the kitchen. It's the spur of something unexpected, the sudden, strong, irrational impulse that really scares me.
