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the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister, who studied people who were contemplating suicide. Those in this situation tend to experience what is known as a deconstructed state, where they have such a strong sense of an inner numbness that they have little or no concept of a future and find it hard to imagine that life might ever improve if they remain alive or that choosing death wouldhave serious ramifications. People planning suicide are in a very particular mental state where the perception of time can become skewed. As an aside, it is a state which can also explain why suicide notes often reveal so little. The American sociologist Edwin Shneidman spent more than a quarter of a century studying the meaning of suicide notes after finding a collection of them in the vaults of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office in 1959. He decided to devote his career to their study, determined to gain an insight into the suicidal mind. His analysis showed, probably not surprisingly, that suicide notes contain a greater percentage of first-person singular pronouns than other sorts of documents. But it seems in terms of insight their content is disappointing. After spending more than 25 years obtaining and analysing notes, Shneidman concluded that most tell the same story, and despite being ‘written at perhaps the most dramatic moment of a person’s life, are surprisingly commonplace, banal, even sometimes poignantly pedestrian and dull’. 10 Later in life he decided that odd phrases could sometimes be telling, but that most notes still bring little by way of explanation to those left behind. Only a third of people who kill themselves even leave a note. Somewhat harshly Shneidman believes that those who do are the kind of people who like stating the obvious. He doesn’t disguise his bitterness at his disappointment with the style of the notes: ‘To a “Quarantine – Measles” sign such a person might add the words “Illness inside – please stay out”.’ He believes that because people who are about to kill themselves are in this altered state, a state of such fixed purpose where time is warped, they are unable toexplain much about their state of mind. The tragedy here is that an explanation is exactly what those left behind are searching for. And Shneidman believes we optimistically look for even more than that; we hope that someone on the brink of death might have some ‘special message for the rest of us’. But lest we think that Shneidman was lacking in sympathy for those driven to suicide, he did a great deal to pioneer the field of suicide prevention and co-founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center in 1958, a centre that was to become famous in 1962 after it concluded that Marilyn Monroe’s death was caused by ‘probable suicide’.
    People with depression can experience distortions of time even if they are not feeling suicidal. During an episode of depression, the past and the present become central, while the future – especially any kind of hopeful future – is almost impossible to imagine. The British psychiatrist Matthew Broome has frequently seen this in patients. And experiments confirm that people with depression give time estimations that are on average twice as long as those who are not depressed. In other words time is going at half its normal speed. This leads me to wonder whether in some cases depression could be considered a disorder of time perception. Or perhaps the slowing of time is a consequence of depression, which then helps to maintain it and makes it harder to escape from. Matthew Broome points out that we know that sleep deprivation and the use of a light box can both elevate a person’s mood as they confuse the internal clock. 11 When a person is depressed the present and the future become ‘bound to one another in suffering’. 12 The effect is so distinct that the philosopher of psychiatryMartin Wyllie suggests that as an additional diagnostic tool, mental health professionals