This Famous Quote About Suicide Is Dangerously Wrong
David Foster Wallace, one of the greatest American novelists of all time, has a hugely popular quote about suicide…and it’s dead wrong.
On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace wrote a note to his wife, stacked an unfinished manuscript on his desk, and hung himself from the back porch of his Claremont, California home.
Wallace didn’t talk a lot about his personal struggles with depression, choosing instead to explore it through his characters. As people scrambled for answers in the wake of his death, they would find his thoughts on suicide in his greatest work, Infinite Jest.
Here’s the bit everyone latched onto:
“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…
