Having read the entire thread, which took a while...and not directed to anyone in particular:

I always have the urge to pipe up when people make the assumption that depression is a state caused by a reaction to one's circumstances. What if a person's suicidal depression is truly chemical, as in, they are being poisoned by something they are continually exposed to (such as toxic mold,) it is undiagnosed, they cannot live with it any more and choose to suicide just as someone might choose to suicide from intractable physical pain? They aren't escaping from a situation that they need to attend to; they are escaping ongoing intractable pain.

It always bothers me when I see fear-based responses to a query about suicide, where the "Don't Do It!" just leaps out of the fearful person who attempts to transfer their fear to the person they are talking to. When someone tries to transfer fear to me, I know they are under the influence of something I don't want.

Since the quirks of various parts if the USA were duscussed, let me put in a good word for the rural Pacific Northwest (Washington), to which I moved from Buffalo just over 6 years ago.  I have met  the most surprisingly interesting people here: e. g.
(1) the karate instructor for young Elvis and Chuck Norris.  His walls were plastered with photos of himself as a young man posing in his karate uniform with both stars.
(2) a child actor in his late 80s who had played prominent roles in movies with actors like a very young Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. We showed one of his old movies in my church.  His running commentary of his relationship with Hepburn with fascinating.  He had personal letters from her! 
(3) a physicist who helped build hydrogen bombs at Los Alamos and asked me to play with his "nuclear toys" while waiting for dinner (I worried that they were still radioactive (e. g. the sand in the crystal ball turned green through radiation, the rocks exotically reshaped by a bomb).
(4) a man whose funeral I performed: he was one of the first Americans to drive through Hiroshima after its bombing.  After a bulldozer cleared a path through the debris, he drove his captain over the still white-hot ruins.  That night, he was invited by a Japanese family for a dinner (grilled octopus!).  He said it tasted like rubber and he couldn't swallow it until he  chopped it up in small bits that he swallowed whole. 
(5) a lot of stressed Vietnam war vets who liive in the woolds to avoid contact with people.

Don