Hello, David: Thanks for yours. Your new avatar looks raring to go. Where, will that's the question. They're saying now that climate change killed off the mamouths. If so, then, it was one degree at a time over thousands of years.

I don't think anybody here advocates suicide. Please note in the neurotalk instructions that illegal acts are not to be encouraged -- and suicide is illegal. Indeed, I rigorously oppose it for that young person just out of college, who is in good health but unemployed and can't find a job, whose parents divorce, etc. (Exactly my circumstances, by the way). Yes, if that person willingly kills himself, he commits suicide. Again, though, not everybody who kills himself or herself commits suicide, such as the people who jumped to their deaths from the burning Twin Towers. What are we to say to or about such people? Don't do it? Don't jump?

I also agree with you that ANY self-imposed death is a tragedy. I worked in a large county hospital as a college student, and saw some amazing cases. It was there that I started thinking that someone who physically suffers and has no chance (as far as anybody knows) of getting better, who "takes his own life," who "lets go," has not committed some sort of sin or should be legally punished. I will never forget going to the men's room, washing my hands, looking down and seeing ... a pool of blood flow from someone in a locked stall. A patient was cutting his wrists with a razor blade. I remember thinking, My God -- THERE MUST BE SOME WAY TO STOP THIS SORT OF THING!!!! A human being, reduced to that... i still have that same thought today, over 40 years later.