Status Updates From History of Suicide: Volunta...

Melancholia, Willis wrote, is "a madness without fever or frenzy, accompanied by fear and sadness.' Animal spirits become "obscure, opaque, shadowy" when they are agitated, and the images they carry to the brain are veiled with "shadows and with shades". The individual grows sad and prone to morbid, even suicidal reactions.

Suicide is an act unlike any other because those who commit it place themselves out of reach of all human power. (…) Suicide falls outside usual norms. The entire and powerless arsenal of laws and anathemas has no hold on reality; it is like a machine turning in the void, a sword striking a blow in the water, a cannonade aimed at a ghost.