I'm going to agree with Rachael twice in a week now, the earth must be spinning off its axis and careening though space. She is 100% correct except that even a dead badger might have more emotional sensitivity.
You might try reading some history books, for the few Jews (just perfect that you don't even bother to capitalize that word either) that made it out of those camps, plenty died having given up the will to live. Try reading Viktor Emil Frankl, M.D., Ph.D., who wrote a book in 1946 called ...trotzdem ja zum Leben sagen (Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager) (literally: "...saying yes to life regardless; A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp). Its known in English (for those of you who can only read one language) by the title Man's Search for Meaning. He wrote that because he wondered how some made it though, and others did not. Before the war, he treated people who were prone to suicide, and having treated over 30,000 before he was arrested, he knew something about the process and the problem.
Faced with life on the reservations - and make no mistake, Native American Reservations were just Concentration Camps without the amenities - the death rate was astronomical in percentage terms. (Which was just what the people who put them there wanted by the way.) Many there, like in the Nazi Death Camps, just gave up the will to live. Or to put it another way... did not want to live if that was the life they had to go through.
Ever go to jail? If you do, wear loafers, because they will take your shoelaces away from you to keep you from hanging yourself, so real is the thought of suicide when most people are arrested. That whole 'pants sagging down past your ass" deal is because no one in prison gets a belt.
the little gay guy getting raped in an ally {sic} by a hateful group of redneck bigots - I'm sure that many have killed themselves. Actually, in all those cases you cited, people have killed themselves because of that.
And the African-American experience in the American South is a rather unique deal on several accounts, and its not really a solid comparison to GID or the Nazi Death Camps, or even the Native American experience. Though, it is interesting to note that given the chance there at the end of the war to kill all the masters, they did not. Perhaps proving that there was a superior and inferior race in the South, it was just not the way people thought - in the South - at that time.
People in real life don't attempt to commit suicide as a joke, or an attempt to 'get attention.' It is always most real. People who attempt suicide, or even threaten it ought to be taken just as seriously as you would the Hell's Angel who's telling you "If you piss on that bike I'm going to kill you." You piss, they are going to be able to send you to your next of kin in #10 envelopes.
The rate of suicide among trans persons is very real, very frightening, and not a joke. I read stuff on this board, and all the boards I visit, and cry (and I'm not the crying type) and then I thank the universe that when I was a teenager I had a change to go a different way - or else that fate may well have been mine.
Yeah, sure there are people who triumph through adversity - we celebrate them because there are not that many. Yes, there are people who thrive being outside the norm. But they are few, not many. (And they are not interested in your celebration, or opinions either, that's why they chose the path they did.)
And Rachael is right, sooner or later people get it right. And here in the Bay Area, were suicide is a bus ride away from almost certain success, we don't kid around with it.
And, whatever I might say about Rachael, that sometimes she is a bitch, or a bit snappy, or a brat (just kidding - not really) I've never read her posts as "whiny." Matter of fact, that's far more you, with the "I can't take this pill, it's too big" stuff. (Like cutting it in half, or crushing it took a rocket scientist to figure out.) Please.
And that "life is always worth living deal," I sure hope you never have to find out just how thin that line can be. It's far less then a micron, to be sure. Once you've had a life, you might come to know that.
