The recent suicide of the musician Chris Cornell has brought some people to ask why and how could he have done this – to question how could it be that a person with seemingly everything to live for, felt that he had enough to die for – thereby ending his life.
My perspective, as a clinician, is this:

We have one mechanism of true power in our lives, to continue or end our existence.
We do not have absolute control over our lives, but each day we either agree or disagree to exist – we either eat and take care to avoid harm, or we seek our own demise. This is the fundamental principle of our being – that we choose our own existence.
There is another more philosophical conversation about how we came into existence, but the essential basis of an existential crisis is that we do exist, and that we continue to exist, and that unless we (or some other force) cause that existence to cease we must find meaning in how we relate our being to the rest of the universe.

The most recent report is that Chris was taking medication that increased his risk of suicidality, and he self-reported being in recovery from addiction, and managing depression.
Is that enough of a combination? Is it a warning that all individuals who fit a similar pattern will harm themselves? No, of course not – there is no definitive test, even when we test for suicidal ideation. It is the secret landscape of the individual.
Perhaps that is the most haunting part when someone takes their life, that it underlines how we can never truly know the dimensions of another person, not matter how close we are.
We can all become strangers to each other.

In my work as a psychotherapist I meet people who have survived suicide attempts, I meet people who have made it though accidental overdoses, and I meet people whose lives have been impacted by the specter of suicide – they all ask the same question, why?

The answer to why is the actually very simple – because at that moment, as the specific parts of the aforementioned mechanism approached alignment – the person in question lost themselves to the abyss. There is no formula for logic in the abyss, no mirror, no perspective – just the absence of hope and reason.

A true act of suicide is absolute, it is resolute – it is not a cry for help, it is an act of power. It is the terrible side of the same coin that houses resolve and resiliency.

It doesn’t much matter if the act comes as a consequence of crushing depression, of perverse chemical alteration, or out of sheer desperation – it culminates in the same thing, in the loss of a life and the change of a landscape, wherein the living must come to terms with the absence of that person. We struggle with that concept, because we are at odds with their wish – suicide is a wish to be absent, to be ended – grief is the struggle between wanting that to be undone, and accepting that it is unchangeable.

I have worked with many people who have come out the other side of the abyss – they have gone through and returned to use. Some attempt suicide and fail, some are found-out before the act, some have visited the abyss before and are able to identify markers on the road in – they all have the same perspective, a kind of fugue state wherein they are aware that something happened, but cannot effectively recall the finite mechanism of suicidality – like attempting to recall the full nuance of a dream just passed. The content is there, but the quality, the immersion has passed.

That is the simplest way I can explain it – when it is real, it is real, and when it has passed or the act has occurred then he state has subsided; as dawn brings light and truth to the shadows.

The answer as to why someone would kill themselves is that in that moment, it seemed the most authentic choice they had.