Members of families in which there has been a suicide are far more likely than others to kill themselves. This is in part simply because family suicides make the unthinkable thinkable. It is also because the pain of living when someone you love has annihilated himself can be almost intolerable. A mother whose son had hanged himself said to me, “I feel as though my fingers are being caught in a slamming door and I’ve stopped permanently in midscream.” It is also because, at a presumably genetic level, suicide runs in families.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon