Suicide Question

I can understand how people who feel ashamed for having done something irretrievably wrong in the current economic mess might kill themselves – like a Bernie Madoff (though his smirking pictures make you think he’s not close to contemplating that). But it’s harder to understand why someone like that German multi-billionaire killed himself the other day. Unless there’s more that will come out, it seems like he was losing control of much of the empire he’d spent decades creating – but thanks to bad bets and mismanagement, not because of improprieties or fraud. If that’s the case, he killed himself basically because he had lost most of his money.

Maybe I’m not thinking about this right, and obviously someone else’s emotional state is a mystery to outsiders, but to kill yourself because you don’t have as much money as you once did seems an awful reason to want to die. Of course this stuff happens (indeed, I just heard about a Palm beach wife who’s leaving her husband because he just lost everything, and she doesn’t want to support him with her trust fund. Nice.) Maybe it was because the German guy felt he let down employees and investors? I don’t know. Wonder what others think.