Although the breaking up of a romance or a marriage may be the precipitating factor, it is not usually the cause of the suicide. Suicide may be directly traceable to childhood experiences. For example, if someone close to a child, such as a parent, commits suicide while the child is quite young, the odds are nine times greater that the child will grow up to commit suicide. Suicide victims are people who have been nickeled and dimed to death in a psychological sense. Most people seem to be ambivalent about almost everything in life, but overwhelmingly ambivalent feelings are especially prominent during suicidal states.
Suicidal people feel as though they want to live and they want to die at the same time.
The suicidal state includes a balancing of the life versus death forces within the individual. The suicidal person is much more negative about life than positive about death. A suicidal crisis usually concerns two people. The first is the suicidal person, and the second is referred to as the significant other . The relationship between the suicidal person and the significant other is often one of neurotic dependency.