[The] ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ . . . not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person . . . will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise . . . Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me . . . The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
Building on fire
