> I've seen people with chronic pain (including long-term fatal cases) that are not just "despair and suffering". Including people who have dreams and follow them (creative work etc) despite the pain.
Without any kind of pain management? With severe, chronic pain?
Well, what I witnessed may have been outliers, but once you hear a person you care for begging to "please, just make it stop" every time she was able to actually articulate some words instead of screaming in pain... that leaves a mark.
What I'm saying is that there is - possibly very different for different people - a threshold of (pain-intensity times pain-time-length) above which everyone will be considering suicide. That the people you know are below such threshold doesn't mean it's not there. Having seen people way above it I really can't accept people telling me that they'd rather "live with the pain". What they mean is they'd rather live with bearable pain, which is OK; however, there is such a thing as an unbearable pain and I don't believe there is anyone who'd like to live with it.
You seem to conflate chronic pain with "living in total agony", like some terminal patient.
People here are not talking about that. Maybe do some reading about what "chronic pain" means medically? It's not just a single thing like the one you described.
It doesn't matter if the "the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population" if that percentage is still small within such a group.
E.g. if 1% kills themselves in the general population, while 2% or even 5% kill themselves in such a group, that's still 95%, an overwhelming majority, that do not.
In which case, what the parent thinks now is not "totally irrelevant" but mostly correct.
>And there is no notion of being brave (or not) once it actually happens to you - there's only despair and suffering. Really, only that. Nothing else, at all.
I've seen people with chronic pain (including long-term fatal cases) that are not just "despair and suffering". Including people who have dreams and follow them (creative work etc) despite the pain.