The New Yorker:

On April 14th, 2014, around four o’clock in the morning, Victoria McLeod, a seventeen-year-old from New Zealand, stood on the roof of a Singapore condominium building, texted a curt farewell to her friends (“Love you all, sorry guys”), and leaped ten floors to her death. Some weeks later, Victoria’s mother spotted a long scuff mark on the building’s façade, which suggested that her daughter had tweaked the trajectory of her fall, insuring that she landed between parked cars on a narrow parcel of tile. “She was so focussed,” Linda McLeod said, “even when she jumped.”

In the months leading up to her death, Victoria (or Vic, as she was called by friends) kept a journal in which she meticulously recorded the torsions of her darkening headspace. Wry and brilliant, Vic proved an astute observer of her peers, as in one passage in which she briskly dissects a paragon of “Mean Girls” popularity: “Walking down Claymore Avenue with $200 Nikes and a cloned training buddy, no doubt to the gym. . . . It’s kind of beyond me how anyone can have their life so sorted.” As her depression deepens, her prose grows more self-aware and more gravely disconsolate. “Today was bad,” she writes. “Sat in the shower. Did the whole crying bit. Sat in bed. Did the whole sad songs and crying bit . . . PLEASE MAKE THIS SAD STOP. FUCKING MAKE IT STOP. God, something out there, please make it stop.”

According to Jesse Bering, a research psychologist at the University of Otago and the author of the new book “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves,” Vic’s journal is an “extraordinary” portrait of cognitive unravelling. While scrutinizing the diary of an adolescent may seem like a dubious scientific enterprise, Bering shows how the evolution of Vic’s dejected bulletins accords with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister’s “Suicide as Escape from Self,” a six-stage theory demonstrating how a person might descend into the pit of self-extinction. What undergirds Bering’s inquiry is the belief that locating the psychological blunders that lead to suicide can help, in time, to curb their prevalence. For Bering, the subject is personal. He writes, “When I get suicidal again—not if, but when—I want to be armed with an up-to-date scientific understanding that allows me to critically analyze my own doomsday thoughts or, at the very least, to be an informed consumer of my own oblivion.”

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