Before asking if something is a solution to a problem, it's worth asking whether we've gotten the problem right. There's a sign I found a few years ago; it's on my office door. It reads "Don't believe everything you think." Almost everyone needs that advice from time to time; I certainly do. A lot of what our brains churn out, especially when we're unhappy, just isn't true. While I was reading what you wrote, that slogan kept coming back to me. The reason? An awful lot of what you say just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Yes: some people have abominable values. But there are also people who are decent, thoughtful, try to do the right thing and often succeed. I'm not guessing about this. I could make a long list drawn just from people I happen to know personally. This includes people who disagree with me about lots of things, including politics and religion. Furthermore, I'm not in any way exceptional. I'm completely comfortable saying that almost everyone knows a great many good people. There are quite...

Let me begin by saying that I'm sorry for your loss. This must be terribly hard. And your sense of guilt is understandable. It's hard to think the thought that one's child may have done the best thing in taking his own life. But as you point out, this thought doesn't come from lack of care or lack of grief, but from the very opposite: from deep caring and empathy born of intimate knowledge of your son's situation. There are some well-known theological and philosophical arguments intended to show that suicide is always wrong. Immanuel Kant offered one that strikes many readers -- it certainly strikes me this way -- as bordering on sophistry; I won't try to reconstruct it here, and won't recommend it as anything you need consider. Theological arguments against suicide often rest on dubious claims about the divine will and the way in which taking one's own life supposedly usurps God's perogative to decide when we die -- arguments that might well make a believer in a loving and merciful God shudder. But...

I would add this, however. While it certainly can be rational to commit suicide, people who are considering suicide aren't always in a good position to think about it rationally. That's for the obvious reason that many (perhaps most) people who are seriously thinking about killing themselves are depressed, and part of what depression does is make it hard to think clearly. A depressed person might believe that there's no hope, and that the pain will never end, but that's often not true. So yes: suicide can be rational. But if you know someone who's thinking about it, helping them get help may serve what they would understand as their own rational ends if only they were in a better position to see them.