Listening to their despair can help those in suicide’s grip

It often takes a confluence of many highly individual factors — mental illness, addiction, childhood trauma — to leave people so bereft of hope that they end their own lives. Suicide is complicated, and often brought on by emotionally charged, intensely personal events. It’s the kind of thing that keeps people from taking a casserole over to the house of someone who might be contemplating suicide, or the family of someone lost to it.