Hot off the press -- of Wikipedia, that is. This is their article on "Rational Suicide."

"Rational suicide is the reason-guided decision to end one's life, specifically, when these reasons are the result of an indifferent or temperate weighing of pros and cons. It has been argued that a suicide can be rational and still nonetheless be a mistake.[1] Rational suicide is sometimes viewed as a subjective concept; Jerome Motto writes, "What may be an inconvenience, a source of discomfort, or an embarrassment to one person represents unbearable agony, excruciating pain, or intolerable humiliation to another."[2] One study of mental health counselors found that 80% of respondents were moderately supportive of the idea that people can make well-reasoned decisions that death is their best option.[3] It is believed that in coming years clinicians will increasingly be confronted by patients declaring their intention to exercise their right-to-suicide or to commit what they describe as a rational suicide.[4] The “received orthodoxy” of mental health professionals for more than a century views all suicides as irrational and holds that suicidal persons should always be prevented from ending their own lives.[5]"

My immediate reaction: "indifferent or temperate weighing of pros and cons." Sorry, I don't see how when your life is at stake, you can be "indifferent." As for "temperate," maybe that's in the eye of the beholder: someone may SOUND termperate (including me) and maybe truly think they are, when in reality it is their unconscious that is running the show, and all their quaint rationalization is so much window-dressing.

I think there is, as Waves point out, a semantic problem. What is "suicide," anyway? Merriam Webster Dictionary: "The act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind." Sorry, that sounds counter-intuitive to me: a 20-something who is depressed and unemployed, gets drunk and shoots himself, commits suicide. Of course the word "especially" creates a fudge-factor, so I don't know what that definition is saying in the end, if anything.

Here's another definition, from the Medical Dictionary: "The act of causing one's own death." Simple, no? In fact, too simple. Sorry, but the 200 people who leaped from the burning Twin Towers thereby caused their own deaths; however, they did not commit suicide. The latter is the official government ruling, by the way. I can see how the insurance companies would love the Medical Dictionary's hopelessly broad definition; usually, they don't have to pay out if a death is officially ruled a "suicide."

Well, I suspect much of the problem is there -- what is "suicide" in the first place? All the existing definitions I have seen are inadequate in one way or another. Note carefully: serious economic concerns, notably insurance companies, and megabucks are in play in forming such definitions ("organic" and "poverty" are two others), so watch out!

Trying to look at the question on a "pure" level: my gut hunch tells me that Websters has it upside down -- that "rational suicide" is an oxymoron, i.e., somebody who takes their life rationally does NOT commit suicide. "Intention," "voluntary," well, such words keep popping up. There's something to them, but they haven't come together to form a coherent definition -- not yet. Until they do, we literally "don't know what we are talking about."

I suspect we're looking at a "syndrome," literally a group of things "running together." Not all of them need to be present to have a "suicide."