David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker

Much of this mini-biography of David Foster Wallace makes his suicide more explicable if no less sad. Concerned that his antidepressant medication was interfering with his creativity, he went off it in 2007 hoping to be a "different person and a different writer" though he recognized that "maybe the drug wasn't the problem; maybe he simply was distant, or maybe boredom was too hard a subject." A gamble of art over life?

He was haunted by the demons of mental illness from a young age and he searched for the spiritual in a way so few of his fellow talented writers did, which is what makes his story poignant. At core it seems the spiritual search was one aimed at morality and/or merely as an instrument (understand given his illness) to reduce pain, rather than one aimed at relationship and union with God. Which is the way most of us approach God:

As he told Salon, “I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the A.A. model isn’t the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.”... At the halfway house, Wallace got to know people with radically different backgrounds. “Mr. Howard,” he wrote his editor, “everyone here has a tattoo or a criminal record or both!” The halfway house also showed him that less intellectual people were often better at dealing with life. They found catchphrases such as “One day at a time” genuinely helpful. To his surprise, so did he. As he later told Salon, “The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting—which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff—can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.”

His last, unfinished novel he called "The Pale King" was giving him fits, not surprisingly given that it sounds like a sort of alchemical project of bringing excitement out of tedium:

It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”...

The problem was how to dramatize the idea. As Michael Pietsch points out, in choosing the I.R.S. as a subject Wallace had “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.”