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I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.
9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.
Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.
If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.
A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.
Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.
I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.
But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.
The 9/11 Attack Considered as a Self-Help Group for Depression.
Osama Bin Laden was the organizer of the therapy session.
The north tower got off to a bad start.
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