Mental Health II: Suicide is Painless

The second in a series of five essays about Mental Health to celebrate the dog days of August.

Mental Health I: Why I Write

On Friday March 28, 1975 I tried to kill myself.

I failed.

I hadn’t failed at much in life, at least not on paper. I was a twenty-one-year-old junior at MIT, son of a lower-middle class family from…