It goes without saying that not each and every case of depression is to be traced back to a feeling of meaninglessness, nor does suicide in which depression sometimes eventu-ates- always result from an existential vacuum. But even if each and every case of suicide had not been undertaken out of a feeling of meaninglessness, it may well be that an individual's impulse to take his life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for.
If, thus, a strong meaning orientation plays a decisive role in the prevention of suicide, what about intervention in cases in which there is a suicide risk? As a young doctor I spent four years in Austria's largest state hospital where I was in charge of the pavilion in which severely depressed patients were accommodated—most of them having been admitted after a suicide attempt. I once calculated that I must have explored twelve thousand patients during those four years. What accumulated was quite a store of experience from which I still draw whenever I am confronted with someone who is prone fo suicide, I explain to such a person that patients have repeatedly told me how happy they were that the suicide attempt had not been successful; weeks, months, years later, they told me, it turned out that there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life.
"Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thou sand cases," my explanation continues, "who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later?
But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you."
- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning