His wife, Jane Clementi, wept as she read out a statement to the court saying that she was very close to her son, but "even I had no idea of the despair and torment Tyler must have been feeling".
Mr Abe acknowledges that voters gave him a decisive victory not out of love for his party or ideas, but out of despair at the outgoing Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) which, at war with itself, struggled to make policy.
Since they published their first paper, Case and Deaton have found their e-mail in-boxes filling up with emotional responses from people for whom the idea of an epidemic of despair had personal resonance.
Yet, such is the current mood of despair that the idea the Conservative Party might simply disappear from view, much as the Liberals did after the first world war, is now seriously discussed.
Before Reed got to work, pop's idea of darkness was the romantic despair of Roy Orbison's Running Scared, the adolescent misogyny of the Rolling Stones Underr My Thumb or the acid put-down of Dylan's Positively 4th Street.
But he didn't give up, and it was from this pit of despair and disappointment that he conceived the idea of giving courses in public speaking.
Pick your way through the swipes at the coalition, and you will find just as many sighs of despair at the left's lack of ideas.
(Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?) For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal – some of them Maoists, many not – have managed to hold off the big corporations.
Mark Hayward, a local newspaper columnist who's also a parishioner at Saint Anne-Saint Augustin, wrote a sympathetic story describing Mirna's despair at the idea of raising her two boys alone.
