From timing it's likely that the lawsuit pressure was central in Aaron's reasoning. But in suicidal depression, accurate reasoning breaks down. Survivable, tolerable, and temporary things can seem permanent and intolerable. Without one apparent trigger (the prosecution), a depressive mind could latch instead onto other rationales... even rationales that seem to outsiders like personal triumphs. Inside the depressive mind those triumphs might not deliver the expected satisfaction, or may seem to represent a peak that can never be matched again and just wasn't enough.

I know it seems pat to say, "it was depression, period". There should be more consideration of the particulars than that. But it's equally pat to say, "a smart guy killed himself, he must have had logical reasons, let's rank all the potential logical reasons from public information, and conclude the top item on that list is 'the' reason". Without severe depression, all the publicly-known logical reasons aren't enough to explain this suicide.... but severe depression, or other stresses not publicly known, might explain it.

However other suicidal people reading us all saying "Oh it was definitely the trail, that's why he killed himself", they might just think that if there is a lot of external pressure they are justified in killing themselves. This might lead to people killing themselves. Please try to discourage that.

It's like security research. We follow Responsible Disclosure for vulnerablities where you don't tell the public first. When there is a big bug (e.g. the recent Ruby on Rails bug), we don't all post links to proofs of concepts. Why? Because doing these things tends to result in innocent people getting hurt. The same thinking should be at play with suicide.

It's not the only factor but as jlgreco said it's the "sack of bricks that broke the camels back"

Stop acting as if depression was logical.

And your argument is completely unrelated to what I was objecting to, which is the idea that admitting influences on suicide must be stopped because it's badthink and could cause more suicide.

And that's why suicide is indeed special here, but in a different sense: it's special because random careless talk on a forum can be such a trigger, or be the seed of a future trigger.

Of course one cannot be held accountable for such an event, but given it's simple and free to avoid simplifying the causes of suicide, why not avoid it?

It isn't free though. It's de facto censorship.

Aaron Swartz is dead. People want to know why. People want to make sure something like this doesn't happen again to someone else. To do that on a rational basis, you have to understand the cause. It appears quite likely that the cause, or at least a very large contributing factor, was this prosecution by the DoJ. What they did was unacceptable. If nothing is done they will do it again, and again, and again. How can we do anything about it if we can't even talk about it?

I get what you're trying to say. It isn't sensible to commit suicide just because you're in a bad place. But you're arguing like all people have to do is shut up and everything will be fine. Not talking about it doesn't get it fixed.

I'm arguing that mentioning the most logical trigger as a sure main/only cause for the suicide, besides being fallacious, can potentially cause more harm than good.

We sure must not accept what is regularly being done in prosecutions, but not because someone died, rather because it's a policy of terror instead of application of justice.

I understand. I just don't think it's that simple. A major part of making normal people understand the severity of this policy of terror is to understand what its victims feel. You can't just separate the two so easily and say "excessive prosecutions are bad, go fight them" -- to do that we still have to convince people why they're so bad, to make them understand what the victims of the justice system feel, and "they're so egregious they're capable of driving good people to suicide" is a very powerful fact if you can show it. It's the kind of thing that can make the difference in whether it gets fixed or not.

It'd be interesting to know how many people commit suicide on prosecution.

Yes, we should try to stop suicide. So why not listen to the professionals & experienced? Why not listen to what they say helps and hinders? The people who work full time trying to stop suicide tell us that this sort of 'blame one thing' hinders that goal!

Because general-purpose advice doesn't always fit specific circumstances. I look at it as taking the long view or the short view: If we talk about this now we may increase the risk of copycats in the short term, but fix it and indefinitely on from that point the justice system is no longer putting so much pressure on its victims that so many become a suicide risk, to say nothing of rectifying the real injustices against the accused who are only pushed up to the line but not over it. It's cold math but that's the way it is.

I think you will find that most people are aware of that. But it very well could have been the factor that drove him over the edge and you're going to have to allow for that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuit