From what I read there are several causes of suicide:

* Legitimate reasons, e.g., you're a French resistance fighter captured by Gestapo and if you speak under torture innocent people will be deported to Auschwitz (okay, had to "Godwin" this preemptively); you are elderly and are terminally ill with a very painful illness and want to die with dignity.

I think suicide should be legal and legitimate for individuals in truly unescapable circumstances. The exception could be those who commit suicide to escape retribution, but we should ask deeper questions of why individuals prefer death to imprisonment if (historically) death penalty has been a greater deterrent and is today reserved only for the most heinous crimes (in other words, if don't feel an individual has committed a crime heinous enough to warrant death, why is that we find it to inflict punishment considered by many to be worse than death?)

The key way to reduce suicide cause by these reasons in a first world society is to fight its causes which are already societal ills even when they do not lead to society (reduce brutality in prisons and offer better rehabilitation programs for convicts, actively work to fight terminal illness, have a better societal safety net, etc...)

* You are making a cry for help, you want people to notice you, and to intervene. Generally people in those circumstances attempt suicide in public, write a suicide note, and use means that are known to be reversible (pills that don't act instantly, public attempts, etc...).

I think this is where the most common means (e.g., suicide prevention hotlines) work very well.

* Bipolar or unipolar depression, negative symptoms of schizophrenia: in this case, no one may even know that you're planning to take your own life, there's seldom a note left, and the method used is usually more certain (e.g., firearm, actually toxic drugs). Gun control is not the solution either -- it may or may not be a valid route to violence prevention (this is an entirely different topic) -- it is nearly impossible to obtain firearms in Belarus (my home country) and very difficult to do so in Japan, but these countries still have a very high suicide rates despite being (respectively) second and first world countries (i.e., there are certainly problems, but there is no mass starvation, civil war, genocide, etc... going on).

I don't know Jody, but it's possible that the latter is what indeed happened here. When such a person is suicidal it's already too late: the best way to help them is to remove societal stigma against the mentally ill. If we take the illness paradigm seriously, then they will then be able to get help early on and lead happier lives; an obvious parallel is with epilepsy, we stopped seeing it a curse from Apollo and began to seriously research and understand its physiological causes.

Society needs to understand that far more often even the most stigmatized illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar type I a.k.a. "manic-depressive") are characterized by the negative symptoms (inability to experience pleasure, inability to focus, apathy, etc...). The media is far too focused on the positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, mania, etc...) and portrays the suffers of these illnesses as prone to violence or bizarre acts; even the films that are generally commended for positive portrayal of mental illness do this.

Reality is that the negative symptoms are more prevalent and hurt their suffers worse. Society needs to re-focus the image and allow these individuals to get help without fearing a permanent stigma and loss of civil rights. From a harm prevention point of view mentally ill individuals are more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators, so while violence committed by mentally ill makes headlines, if we're playing a "greater good for greater number of people" game it's better to err on the side of allowing individuals with positive symptoms to remain unrestrained than to force individuals with negative symptoms into hiding (out of fear that they'll be involuntarily committed).

I am very lucky in that my family has no history of mental illness. Yet, research seems to indicate that the intelligence and mental illness are tied together; in today's society intelligence is more important to evolutionary success than ever before (this can be seen through Flynn effect), so mental illness will most likely become more common in the future. It might even become endemic to certain area, e.g., Bay Area where someone who is not a knowledge worker will soon be unable to afford a place to live.