Oh the angst of it all! Delicious :D
Gonna say, i love your interpretations but mine is a bit different.
I agree that one of Albus' worst moments in his life, mental health wise was directly after defeating Grindelwald, for exactly the reason you mentioned prev. I think though that it is tied with the time following Ariana's death. Setting the obvious trauma of both of these instances aside, I think these were the moments in Albus' life where he completely lost his sense of selve (in case of Ariana's death) and his purpose (in case of defeating Grindelwald). And if he was ever actively suicidal (which I do believe for the reasons described above), it was during these times.
Now I think that he didn’t spent all the times in between or after acutely suicidal for the simple reason that this man is a perfectionist and well ... we know he never succeed in killing himself. If he truly decided to kill himself and stuck to that decision, he would have succeeded at some point. Imo he probably seriously contemplated it a few times, maybe even made preparations, but never went through with it.
After Ariana, my headcanon is that he tried to find a cure for her "illness". (I personally do not count the FB movies as canon. It's at best an alternative movie canon. But whether or not you count the whole obscurial thing doesn't really matter here.) This research would have given him a sense of purpose, even if it was a desperate one. And it might have lead him to work more closely with Nicholas Flamel and maybe he and Perenelle were a stabilising influence on his life. Eventually the transfiguration post opened. That meant even more work and more importantly, it meant Albus could hide in Hogwarts from what he feared most at the time and for most of his life: His own ambitions.
Fast forward a few years, Gellert's star is on the rise. (and by that I mean, he's actively committing atrocities which are bad enough to make the front page of the daily prophet all the way across the chanel) Now here's where my differences with the FB movies become relevant: I don't think it was common knowledge that Albus and Gellert even knew each other, mich less that they were close. The only people who knew where Aberforth and Bathilda and neither would bring it up in front of the ministry. Nor do I think that Albus would be pressured from the outside to intervene. Why would he? At this point he's well known in academic circles as a brilliant researcher and to the general public as a popular teacher. He's not a hero and he's not Dumbledore™️ yet. No I think the mounting pressure to confront Gellert came only from within (and maybe from some particularly pointed comments from Aberforth). And it was killing him. Albus is his own worst judge of character. Nothing anyone could say would be worse than his internal monologue as the death toll keeps rising. I think this is where Albus life-long number one coping method first appears: compartmentalisation and disassociation. He goes about his business, teaches, publishers research, invents spells (he isn't a political figure yet). He works and works, often till exhaustion because that way, he doesn't have to confront the headlines and the pictures of dead civilians and the sinking feeling that protecting the world from himself maybe isn't enough to make amends for Ariana's death. Maybe, he'll have to protect it from Gellert, too.
Eventually, it becomes too much. He can't hide anymore. He thinks he won't survive the duel. He's at peace with it. Like so many decades later, he thinks his death would have a purpose (if he takes Gellert with him).
Miraculously, he survives the duel. They both do. (Why? My headcanon is that Gellert, unlike Albus, was not prepared to kill. The elder wand, ever choosing the person who is stronger, more ruthless, sensed this. It was ready to shift its allegiance.) Albus does to Gellert what he's already done to himself. He shuts him away in a tower, where he can't hurt anyone, where he's safe.
Again, I completely agree that this is where his mental health takes a nosedive right to the depth of the Mariana trench once more. Not only has he just had to fight the man he loves loved, he's also just had to confront everything he's kept neatly compartmentalised for decades —the memories surrounding Gellert, Ariana's death and the question who killed her, the many lives that were lost to Gellert because he, Albus, didn't step in sooner — and I think that alone brought him very close to the brink.
He becomes the Dumbledore™️ we meet in the books. Now at first, I think Albus would have hated the attention he got after defeating Gellert. He doesn't think he deserves the praise, the awards, the hero-worship he gets from the press and from various governments, who are all tripping over themselves to show their gratitude.
Again, since I don't think Albus' and Gellert's history would be common knowledge, he appears to be a very simple hero, the knight in sparkling robes who stepped up out of the no obligation, but simply because of his own innate goodness, to defeat the evil dark lord. Albus knows this to be false. He's not hero. In his mind, he simply stopped the monster, he himself created. In fact, he's saved the world from himself as much as Gellert. But he can't reveal that. His entire life is wrapped up in never showing those darkest parts of himself. So as much as he hates it, in time, he learns to appreciate that mask. The idol that the press created for him and the public adopted, the near-mythical figure that is more idol than man. He learnes to wear it as a mask and shield.
That is when he takes on more political responsibility too, btw. Albus, who is prone to ambition and cannot be trusted with power, can't let himself gain influence outside of Hogwarts. Dumbledore™️ though — the myth that is built around ideas of heroism and wisdom, his brilliance softened by eccentricities — can stand for something politically. He's careful to only ever remain as mediator within those roles (there's a brilliant meta put there, I think written by @dufferpuffer that details how Dumbledore's political roles were all mostly representative or procedural in nature. Edit: found it! ) but he does take them on.
And here he finds his purpose again. Though there's a part of him that still grates at the unfairness of the system, he only ever uses that part to help people in his immediate surroundings. (Doing that he's still got that rebellious "fuck the government" streak.) He doesn't allow himself to ever take radical political action though. He doesn't trust himself with that. (And that is how you get someone who holds such radical views but refuses to ever take radical action. Again there's a meta about that out there somewhere, this time I don't remember by whom.)
The idol, the myth of Dumbledore™️ becomes his purpose. He uses it to isolate himself even more than he already has — Most people aren't even interested in getting to know him personally anymore. Why would you want to shatter such a comfortable lie? — and he uses it to compartmentalise even further. He doesn't have to think or feel about Ariana, or Gellert or his guilt when the majority of the time he is Dumbledore™️, hero, eccentric genius, benevolent yet distant headmaster, someone who is so much a creature of the mind that emotions are only passing things that never touch where it hurts.
That is why I kind of disagree with the first addition (I don't mean this as criticism! I love your interpretation and I'm delighted you gave me the opportunity to write a damn near-novel about my own ^^). I don’t think Albus would have killed himself if it wasn't for Voldemort. I think he would have simply remained as that figure. He would've probably kept himself busy with more academic work, more diplomacy, more advocacy for (let's call them) marginalised people and creatures within the wizarding world. I honestly think he would have died bent over some academic writing at the age of 200. He wouldn't have been happy, he probably would have still been clinically depressed and passively suicidal, but I think he would have remained functional and ... somewhat content within that role.
The funny thing is that I think, these things would have never come to actually claim his life if it wasn't for Voldemort and Harry.
Voldemort is the one who forced him into the role of a general. There is nothing like it before Voldemort in Albus' life and I think that is because after his brief stint of fantasising about violent revolution, he didn't ever want to give himself that kind of power. Having accepted and stepped into the myth of Dumbledore™️ though, combined with his knowledge about Tom Riddle as well as him being a genuine genius of strategy, him taking the lead in the fight against Voldemort becomes a forgone conclusion. I think he must have realised early on that he was the one person most suited for that fight and so he built the order.
And he does feel some satisfaction in that role. After all, it us necessary and again, it gives him a strong purpose, something to project his genuine desire to do good on. But then the deaths keep mounting. Albus is forced to make tougher and tougher calls. He's faced with decisions where he can only save so many people and he HAS to decide who gets to live, impossible choices that nevertheless have to be made. Eventually, he might even consciously sacrifice some to save many, not because he wants to but because the choice is there and he's maneuvered himself into the position of being the one who has to make it. (And he's so used to doing everything by himself, why start sharing the burden now?) I think, this is where the phrase "For the greater good" comes back to haunt him. Somehow, he's come right back to those words and suddenly he HAS to live by them. (For am excellent portrayal of his resentment at that irony,read "35 owls" by letterblade on Ao3. It's a fandom classic for a reason.) A lot of Albus' idealism about the world got lost during those years. If before he was distant and removed from others, this is where he grew cold. (And that's whom we see dealing with Snape in the prince's tale.)
And then, Harry gets thrust into his life. Albus, now firmly in his role as general and comfortable if not happy in his isolation, is suddenly responsibile for one specific child. I think people forget, especially those that tend to still view Albus as godlike (albeit a malicious one), that this was not something that Albus chose. Call it luck or fate, but the prophecy is something that happened to him, just as much as it happened to Voldemort, Harry and even Severus. All of these people had made choices based on but none of them decided that it was going to happen. So suddenly it's not just Albus position in the war that leads puts him in a position where he has to make tough calls, it's literal fate. (I have some half-formed thoughts on the role of fate and the prophecy, both within the stories and the lifes of the people who witnessed it/who it talked about but this is already getting too long)
We get some unusually candid insight into how Albus deals with this emotionally. He describes how he planned around the prophecy, how he worked around it to protect Harry, both for his own sake as an innocent child and as the potential saviour of millions. And he tells Harry that from the start he saw "a flaw in the plan". And that flaw? Love, plain and simple. Albus knew that he wasn't immune to it. But he feared it, feared how it would impede or his judgement and could thus endanger both the world and Harry. After all, when Albus Dumbledore loves, people get hurt. I've always been fascinated by how he says: "I alone could prevent this, so I alone had to be strong." (Quoted from memory from the lost prophecy) it's strangely vulnerable, the admittance that it does take strength for him to isolate himself. And he still fails in this. He grows to love Harry and care for him, not as the abstract concept of an innocent child, but as a real, concrete person.
And here's the kicker: I think in Albus' mind, what happens in book 5 proves his fears are correct. He loves Harry and in loving him, he protected him for too long and so Sirius died and Harry suffered. He tells him as much: "It is my fault that Sirius died." Now I think anyone who is not in Albus head can see clearly that he misscharacterised the true failing here. It's not the fact that he loved Harry, it's that he isolated him from himself and other, tried to wrap him in protective bubble wrap instead of treating him like a person with agency over his own life. (In other words, he acted as he was taught protective love, parental love operates. There's so much of Kendra in him it makes me insane.) And Harry points this out to him: "People don't like being locked up! You did it to me all last summer ..."
It's no accident that this is where Albus' "calm, almost detached" facade breaks and he buries his face in his hands. Harry, his love for him, the role Albus suddenly played in his live and especially how it all came to a head in book 5 imo retraumaticed Albus in a way even he himself didn't see coming, though he was afraid of getting emotionally attached. (Book 5 in general is a study in trauma and how it makes people act irrationally: Harry, Sirius, Molly, Severus and Albus are just a few examples of this. For all that I criticise Rowling, writing trauma is something she excells at.) Harry drags everything he's buried for so long — everything he's compartmentalised neatly away, kept separate from the figure of the myth and idol of Dumbledore™️ whose a creature of the mind and never of the heart — right back to the surface. And because Albus has never learned to deal with this by confronting it, only by shutting it away, he gets overwhelmed by it. It directly contributes to his death. (He also tries to learn from it. One of my favourite things about Hbp is that we see some real character development in Albus in the way he finally confides in Harry.)
This is a very longwinded way of saying that I don't think it's a coincidence that Albus puts on the ring a mere few weeks after his confrontation with Harry in the lost prophecy chapter. This is why I don't think Albus would have been actively suicidal without the war against Voldemort. Without the war against Voldemort, he could have comfortably remained as Dumbledore™️, eccentric, distant academic and hero of the war against Grindelwald, without ever confronting his demons outright. It's the war against Voldemort and the way that Harry was shoved into his live that force him to confront his demons. And that's why they get the opportunity to overwhem him once more.
(This got waaaaaay longer than I intended. I somehow just kept adding to it over the course of three days. Now it's become half a manifesto on how i view Albus as a character instead of a short elaboration on my headcanon re his mental health. I could make it's own post out of it ofc but I think the context of this post is relevant. Anyway, thank you prevs for giving me the opportunity to ramble ;))
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