"The noted suicide researcher Edwin Schneidman described the thinking process that proceeds suicide as "tunnel vision" - a narrow focus on immediate concerns, avoiding meaningful integrated thinking, and being closed to new ideas or interpretations..The link between rigid thinking and suicide has long been established. For many years researchers thought that rigidity was a personality trait that predisposed people to commit suicide, but recent evidence indicates that the rigidity of suicidal persons is temporary, part of the response to personal crisis. This fits the view of suicide as an escape from the self: A person undergoing a personal crisis responds with mental narrowing, which includes the rejection of meaningful thought and a rigid adherence to preset, narrow styles of thinking.

The sense of the passage of time among suicidal people resembles that of acutely bored people. The present seems an endless drag...A five minute interval may seem like eight or ten minutes to a suicidal person...Another sign or the restricted time perspective of suicidal persons is their inability to think about the future...They use the future tense less than other people...People spend the time prior to a suicide in empty, meaningless busywork...copying numbers, sorting files, proofreading or making simple calculations."
-Roy F. Baumeister