This is ridiculous hindsight bias, people have been charged with far more than Aaron and didn't kill themselves. Aaron had been depressed for a long time leading up to all of this, yet everyone seems to argue that the prosecution is what did it and he would have been completely fine otherwise.
They have nothing to base that off of, but that's still the case that is frequently made here.
Hindsight bias, not really either, a plain old fact. Some people are more resistant than others, but at some point anyone will snap (for the toughest it may require severe sleep deprivation and torture, but most people have a much lower threshold).
I didn't know Aaron Swartz, and I am thus not familiar with the details of his alleged depressive past.
There are usually a lot of factors that bring people to kill themselves. Assuming he was indeed depressed, the intensity of the symptoms get modulated by external influences. The absolute weight of the charges is also completely meaningless. They were intentionally unfair, and the meaning of a given sentence varies from people to people.
Blaming depression for his suicide on depression alone simply shows you don't know what you're talking about (FWIW I hold a MD).
It's not worth much in this discussion.
Your logic here is fuzzy man. Asserting that everyone has a point at which they will kill themselves? Maybe you're basing this on knowing that YOU have a point at which you'd take your own life.
But what in the thousands of years of human suffering gives you this certainty that "everybody" has this suicidal breaking point?
You can't make an assertion into a "plain old fact" just by repeating it.
I know you can't prove the threshold thing, short of trying to break each and every person on earth. That being said, there are various ways to weaken people (including, for the die hards, prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, manipulation, mental and physical torture, destroying their social status, friendships and families... I never practiced this, BTW), and I believe that you can drive anyone to suicide using them.
For example, put someone in a situation where he has the choice between killing himself or killing someone he loves. 5 seconds to decide, after which, if he didn't act, the other person is killed.
This is becoming really gloomy. I balk out.
Edit, actually the bargain I set up above is not a good example of what I meant exactly, but a good example of the level of cruelty you can use.
Edit2: I didn't downvote you, BTW (AFAIK, you can't downvote the answers to your comments).
Dressing up speculation doesn't change what it is.
> but that doesn't make you correct.
My aim was not to be 100% correct about Arron, but rather to on average be more correct with similar cases.
The fact that you're experiencing or you've experienced depression in the past doesn't mean you're inherently broken.
As for suicide, most people have an acute and a chronic stress threshold that can lead to a so-called "major depression" episode.
Perhaps, but many, many people have been in situations such as Aaron's and not killed themself, so it's warranted to at least ponder if there was something else going on than a mean prosecutor. And here we don't have to wonder, it's been reported already that there was a lot of depression involved.
Which causes deserve funding is a matter of personal choice.