Author, singer-songwriter, music composer and television actor, George Sander’s suicide note, though tragic, was perhaps the most bad-ass suicide note ever to be written by a celebrity. Sanders, in bis later years, suffered from dementia and is health was worsened fast. I think of the emotional pain that I experience every day now, at 28 years of age, and how much emotional pain I have experienced over the past couple of years, and then I think that it probably doesn’t even compare to how much emotional pain you are in right now. It hurts so much, I know. But I don’t even know if you realise how much pain you are in. Perhaps because it’s normal, perhaps because it’s probably never been any other way. His note read: “..I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners …” Another bit of advice I should give you is to let people in. Don’t keep shutting yourself away. Stop being like a robot. I’m saying to let people in, but I don’t even know who you should let in. By the time you are 28 you will be very free and open about talking about stuff – mostly in the hope that it might help others somehow. But you will spend many years shutting yourself off from everyone emotionally, bottling everything up. It just makes everything worse. It just makes everything so much more difficult to deal with. Please let someone in if you can. Following this definition, a triad with a negative word will become balanced if the other two end nodes are positive. An all-positive triad emerges from all positive words or from two positive words with a neutral word. Neutral triads, since they do not contribute to a positive/negative predominance of affect, are not considered (see Fig. 2a). This emotional construction aligns with the definition of balanced ( \(\{+, +, +\}\) and \(\{+, -, -\}\)) and unbalanced ( \(\{-, -, -\}\)) triads in structural balance 42, with the exception that in our application the formation of the unbalanced triad \(\{+, +, -\}\) is not possible.

Notice that our ultimate goal is to identify mental and conceptual associations which are on average most typical for suicide notes. Hence, we do not take a sociological perspective focused on evolution of collective narrative strategies in connection with other social processes 30, 31. Instead, we aim at identifying cognitive patterns which are common across different individuals who committed suicide. Using free associations as linguistic benchmarks for text analysis Her body was found on April 18. She was 59 years old and the relapse of her clinical depression was too much for her to take this time. The beginning of the Second World War, the burning down of her house during the Blitz and the cold receptions to the biography that she had written for friend Roger Fry worsened her mental health.

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October 21: Reports stated the human remains found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park were bones.

I know that you are feeling suicidal right now. No one else in the world knows it. But guess what? This is the 28 year old you writing this letter. You will survive this and by the time you are 28 you will be glad that you did. Her last words on camera: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts’, and in living color, you are going to see another first — attempted suicide.” If negative concepts are predominant, we consider the triad unbalanced. In this sense, emotional unbalance reflects the preponderance of negatively-valenced words within a given triad. Our definition of emotional balance corresponds to the definition of strong structural balance considering \(\{-, -, -\}\) triads as unbalanced 42.Yet, there is so much stigma, so many misconceptions and unhelpful attitudes around suicide. What if we likened it to cancer? Like cancer, suicide does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. There is no stereotypical face of it and no one single path that leads to it. For some, it is a sudden, intense phenomenon that takes life rapidly and with little warning. For others, it is a war waged internally for years. And, like with cancer, what if we did not blame the sufferers, even if their actions seemingly contributed in part to the outcome, and instead understood that they, tragically, lost their battle? September 13: Laundrie leaves home to go hiking in Carlton Reserve, Florida. His family had initially said he departed on September 14, but revised their timeline weeks later. Jiah Khan was quite promising an actress who made her debut in Bollywood with Ram Gopal Verma’s Nishabd in 2007. Jiah’s career was moving fine with two of her films, Ghajini and Housefull making it into the 100 Crore grosser Club. However, her relationship with Bollywood actor Sooraj Pancholi didn’t end well which prompted her to end her life. Her note to Sooraj Pancholi read: “..I don’t know why destiny brought us together. After all the pain, the rape, the abuse, the torture I have seen previously I didn’t deserve this.”

ADAA reserves the right to remove or edit posts that contain explicit, obscene, offensive, or vulgar language. Similarly, posts that contain any graphic files will be removed immediately upon notice.September 6: Laundrie joins his family on a camping trip about 75 miles from their home in North Port.

October 5: Laundrie's sister, Cassie, appeared on Good Morning America and urged her brother to come forward. I wish I could take away all the bad things that have happened to you. I wish I could take away all the pain that you are in right now. I wish I could change the hell that you are in right now. I can’t. All I can tell you is to hang in there, to keep yourself safe and that one day you will be so glad that you did. In Fig. 2c,d we present the results. We observe that the overall degree of balance and the frequency of \(\{+,+,+\}\) triads in the CO network and its configuration models are much higher than for the label-shuffled networks (Fig. 2c). In Fig. 2d we further provide evidence that the CO network exhibits a high level of degree of balance through comparison with the FA network. In the free association network there is a more uniform distribution of triad frequencies and the null models follow the decrease of all positive triads in comparison to the co-occurrence network of suicide notes. Emotional balance in suicide notes as a narrative strategy Her note to husband, Leonard read: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time…. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer”

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To study the emotional balance structure of mental states in suicide notes we start by building a signed network from the CO network (see “ Materials and methods” section); then we evaluate its triad frequency and degree of balance—i.e., fraction of balanced triads; finally we present their statistical significance by comparing observed data against two different null models, as well as against the FA network, proceeding similarly as with the CO network. Let us underline that the comparison between the CO network, coming from suicide notes, and the FA network, coming from mind-wandering in the absence of suicide ideation, aims to identify potential patterns of psychological distress expressed in the language of suicide notes and potentially missing from the mental states of healthy controls during free mind-wandering. Emotional balance and triad significance in suicide notes In addition to direct clinical work, Dr. Ashley is actively involved in other scholarly activities. She has been an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and has provided supervision, trainings, and consultation for students and other professionals. She has several publications, including a blog, and maintains active involvement in professional organizations like the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. She regularly presents keynotes, workshops, and trainings to audiences of all sizes and has been involved in planning and producing local and national conferences.