Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Lynch

Lynch frames suicide in the language he knows best: risk, time horizons, and irreversible decisions. “Permanent solution to a temporary problem” is a clean, investor-grade aphorism, the kind that turns panic into perspective. It works rhetorically because it smuggles a cooling mechanism into an overheated moment: your feelings are real, but they are not forever. The line’s power is its simplicity; it offers a mental handrail when everything feels slippery.

The second sentence is where the cultural voltage spikes. Calling suicide “a choice” tries to restore agency, especially for kids who may feel trapped in a story they didn’t write. In a classroom or a family conversation, “choice” can be a lifeline: if one option exists, others do too, and adults can help widen the menu. That’s the intent behind “we’ll get somewhere” - a pragmatic belief in intervention, not a poetic meditation on despair.

The subtext, though, reveals Lynch’s business-minded bias: problems are temporary, solvable, and responsive to better information. That can be motivating, and also incomplete. Many suicides are bound up with depression, trauma, and neurobiology - conditions that distort choice itself. So the quote lands best as a prevention slogan, not a diagnostic claim: a piece of public-facing rhetoric designed to interrupt fatal certainty, buy time, and invite adults to talk to kids before a temporary crisis hardens into an irreversible act.