With reference to Susan Loone's refreshing take on suicide (Suicide - life's ultimate challenge, April 23), public discourse on the subject of taking one's own life has been so historically characterised by a curious mixture of sensationalism, voyeurism, condescension and moral repugnance that the very notions of suicide and suicidal states of mind have rarely been articulated with any sense of normalcy or candour as the author has done.

Suicide is not a joke, which is why sensationalising cases of suicide - as Malaysian newspapers are predisposed to doing (see recent English daily reports on a suicide in Johor) masks the underlying severity of the problem.

Creating an impression that people who commit suicide are freaks, fit only as tabloid fodder, demeans their integrity, strips them of their personal dignity and completely marginalises the issue of mental health.

As Loone notes, there is a thin line between 'sanity' and 'insanity', but these concepts remain arbitrarily defined till today. Who is to decide who is 'sane' and who isn't?

Is a failure to conform with the societal norms of a particular society considered 'insane'?

If so, will the logical conclusion be that a person who chooses to submit to his or her mental agony by escaping from life as we know it be classified as 'insane' because he or she has failed to deal with emotional pain the way 'sane' members of society choose to do so?

Labels are unhelpful to people with suicidal tendencies, to people whose emotional self-esteem has been dealt by a series of rock-hard blows that they can see no way out of their misery but to bail out of life itself.

Emotions are potent life forces; nothing consumes a person more than emotional agony, hurt that constricts the throat, that tightens the knot in one's stomach, that knocks the world we live in out of all sense of proportion. We take painkillers to relieve physical pain, what antidote is there for emotional agony?

All of us have experienced emotional pain at some point or other, some of us have a greater ability to deal with hurt than others. Others have their emotional antibodies weakened by constant assaults on their mental and emotional well-being that their capacity to manage their psychological welfare is severely diminished.

Dismissing suicidal people merely as persons with mental health disorders, establishes hierarchies of mental health within societies, where people who contemplate suicide reside at the bottom-most rungs. It does not address the fundamental reasons why and how people come into possession of such thoughts.

It dismisses their life experiences and ignores the question of emotional suffering. It trivialises their personhood and denies them of agency.

People choose to commit suicide for all sorts of reasons, some genuinely pressing, others may be less so. But whatever the impetus, it cannot be denied that to the person who contemplates taking his or her own life, these reasons are very real and very painful.

Often, society's denial of the severity of their emotional agony leaves them with little choice but to submit to release they seek.

And as Loone so rightly points out, suicide is not a cowardly choice. It is a courageous act resorted to by people who see no avenue out of the darkness which envelope their lives.

And it is a failure, not on their part for seeing no other option, but ours for failing to understand and for failing to provide the alternatives.