Been thinking a lot about people being suicidal for the past couple years, hadn't thought much about it for a long time- when I was younger it came up a lot, I guess one benefit of keeping almost entirely to oneself for many years is not being confronted with things like that. Anyway, the thing that's clearest to me about it is that suicide is pretty ideal as a method for hurting people in direct proportion to how much they care about you and people who really hate themselves tend to fear, resent, etc. people caring about them. It's hard to know whether not being around to observe and gauge the exact amount of pain caused is a benefit or a drawback. Merely fantasized pain is purer of course, real pain is a big mess.

If one wanted to get a more objective sense of this, one could of course experiment. Just pick one person who cares about you a lot and be dead to them. Probably best to choose someone whose use of modern communications technology allows you to observe the suffering from a safe distance, with little to no risk of providing any comfort to the subject and skewing your results.