This is what Kay Jamison, in her book Night Falls Fast says about suicide notes.."Suicide is not entirely a private act, however; nor is it completely idiosyncratic or unpredictable. We have ways of understanding the psychological underpinnings of suicide, and while they may not provide the final clarity we would like, they give us grounds for a beginning."

She goes on, "Suicide notes - an obvious starting point - often promise more than they deliver. It would seem that nothing could be closer to the truth of suicide than notes and letters left behind by those who kill themselves, but this is not the case; our expectations of how we think people should feel and act facing their own deaths are greater than the reality of what they do and why they do it. Suicide authority Ed Shneidman, for example, in commenting on the disappointing banality of many suicide notes, lets slip his hope, a common one, that the last recorded moments of life will afford a deep or tragic view of dying: "Suicide notes," he writes, "often seem like parodies of the postcards sent home from the Grand Canyon, the catacombs or the pyramids - essentially pro forma, not at all reflecting the grandeur of the scene being described or the depth of human emotion that one might expect to be engendered by the situation."

*Night Falls Fast Understanding suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison