Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.

Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.

Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete

I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.

I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy.