Suicide

It’s unthinkable.  The loss of a spouse, child, or loved one.  It’s even more unthinkable to know that the death was the result of a suicide.  After Suicide follows 12 widows who lost their husbands.  It walks the twisting road of their relationships, how the...

It’s a worthy question.  What are the alternatives to suicide?  That’s the question that Alternatives to Suicide: Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living attempts to answer with its subtitle.  How do we transform the pain that people feel and th...

Every country seems to have its own unique quirks as it relates to suicide.  Some have higher rates and some lower, but more than that, each culture views suicide just a bit differently.  American Suicide: A Psychocultural Exploration (originally p...

With an initial publication date of 1840, The Anatomy of Suicide is perhaps the oldest book I’ve ever reviewed.  A fair question would be what such an old text could teach us today.  The answer is both universal truths that haven’t changed in nearl...

I didn’t get past the foreword before the book proclaimed, “For no one has the gift of prophecy.”  So starts the attempt at Assessment and Prediction of Suicide .  It was the best thinking about how to predict and assess suicidal potential in 1992, a...

Decades after Shneidman started doing psychological autopsies at the request of the medical examiner, a mother who lost her son implored him to use his technique not to help decide whether the death was a suicide or not.  Arthur left a long suicide note, ...

There’s not much that works.  When it comes to suicide prevention, the list of interventions that reduce attempts is small.  There’s Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (BCBT-SP ), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) , and Colla...

While most of the books that I've been reading and reviewing over the past several weeks (and months) are focused on the clinical diagnosis of suicide and its prevention, Bruised and Wounded is focused on those who are left in the wake of suicide. The...

A long time ago, I was told that no one is interested in a negative review.  I was reviewing technology at the time, so a few of the products I set out to review never got a story.  I’ve mostly carried that through in my book reviews.  However, Choosing to L...

If I presented you with a selection of genuine suicide notes and a set of manufactured suicide notes from a matched set of individuals, would you be able to tell the difference?  This is at the heart of Clues to Suicide .  Edward Shneidman famously g...

Of course, the way that you think about things leads towards or away from suicide.  So, how do we find ways to lead people away from suicide as a valid option?  That’s what Cognition and Suicide: Theory, Research, and Therapy is all about.  How do w...

If there was ever a manual that wasn’t called a manual, it’s Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder .  It’s the manual for dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), but it doesn’t have the word “manual” – nor any of the compone...

As effective treatments go, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the big hitter.  Several people have applied it to suicide prevention; Cognitive Therapy for Suicidal Patients: Scientific and Clinical Applications discusses the opportunities for its ...

In principle, I must disagree with any book that calls itself comprehensive. It's impossible to contain everything about a topic in one tome – in part because there's always new discoveries, and in part because it's hard to define the edges of a particular a...

Critical Suicidology can either refer to the critical need for people to become more versed in suicidology or being critical of suicidology’s progress – or both.  While suicide rates vary country by country and year by year, they’re climbing and gl...

One of the things that people often say about those who attempt suicide is that it’s just a cry for help.  While this isn’t true – every attempt should be taken seriously – The Cry for Help covers suicide attempts and death by suicide as it was know...

Suicide is, unfortunately, not the only death of despair.  In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , the argument is made that we’re getting crushed by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol related deaths.  These are, the authors assert, the...

It’s hard to address something that you don’t have a clear definition of.  That’s why Edwin Schneidman wrote Definition of Suicide .  He’s not the only person to tackle this definitional challenge, but he may be the person with the most experience. A Rainbow o...

J. Maxwell Atkinson’s Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death is unusually candid about the state of suicide prevention in 1978. Rather than insisting that we could predict suicide risk when we can’t, Atkinson offers com...

What differentiates the good programs from the bad?  How can you find the programs that will make a difference for addiction or suicide?  What if the answer comes down to hope?  The End of Hope is a retrospective of an affluent, private hospital th...

It started with a movie.  Facing Suicide: Understanding Why People Kill Themselves and How We Can Stop Them started with James Barrat’s film of the same name (without the subtitle).  The book is an expansion of the content in the video.  It’s a cont...

Some books acquire their own mythology.  Groups become so polarized about them that they gain their own mythical qualities.  In the space of suicide prevention, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying h...

Very few things could have a greater immediate and visceral impact on people than talking about Guns and Suicide .  Few topics are more sensitized in America than guns.  Few topics are more emotional than suicide.  No matter where you fall on guns, yo...

One of the most interesting challenges with suicide is figuring out how to study it in a way that leads to better assessments and better interventions.  That’s the heart of A Handbook for the Study of Suicide : learning more about suicide to address as...

They want to help; they just don’t know what to do.  It’s a tragic fact that most psychology and sociology programs don’t have a single class regarding suicide in their entire academic career.  So therapists and social workers encounter a suicidal person ...

“I believe for a vast majority of people, suicide is a bad choice.”  It’s not the first highlight in the book, but it’s close.  In How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind , Chancy Martin exposes his thinking after a lifetime of suicid...

What causes suicide clusters to form?  That’s the fundamental question behind Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them .  The book follows a community known by the pseudonym of “Poplar Grove.”  It recounts stories ...

It wasn’t work with addiction, depression, or hope that led to a Long Walk Out of the Woods: A Physician’s Story of Addiction, Depression, Hope, and Recovery .  It was the fact that Adam Hill discussed his suicide attempts – and that his history is fro...

The thought of someone you love dying is terrifying.  The thought of them dying by suicide is even more so.  Too many people suffer and consider suicide.  Too many people who love them are tortured by their inability to stop the person they love from co...

One of the things about researching suicide is you get the very real sense that it’s somehow an internal conflict that boils over into an act of self-aggression.  It’s this very real consideration that leads to Karl Menninger’s 1938 classic book, Man Ag...

The first highlight is “helping people find their way out of suicidal despair.”  That is a wonderful testimony and summary of Managing Suicidal Risk: A Collaborative Approach .  Sometimes when you read a book, you get a real sense for the heart of th...

I was surprised when Alex took his life. I thought we knew about what the warning signs were for suicide, but clearly, we're wrong. Myths about Suicide explores some of the common myths about suicide – including myths that we still teach people who a...

By the late 1990s, a great deal was being learned about the neuroscience of the brain.  Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) became popular in the 1980s, and it was extended to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 1990, which opened up new doors ...

In my journey in the wake of suicide, the most common thing that I hear is "it doesn't make sense" or "it is so senseless." The survivors who must clean up the mess that the person who committed suicide left are wondering why. The Neuroscience of Suicidal...

For many people, suicide is something they’ve considered at some point in their life.  They’re likely to know someone who has died by suicide by the end of their life.  More disturbingly, they’ll rarely, if ever, talk about it.  November of the Soul: Th...

What if the act of suicide isn’t a moment of desperation but is instead the result of a lifetime of wounds and hurts that just don’t seem to heal quite right?  What if we could see these hurts, and, in doing so, approach a sense of intervening before it’s...

The numbers are vanishingly small.  Murder-suicide accounts for just 2% of suicides, themselves numbering around 14 per 100,000.  Still, every death is a tragedy, and because it’s a tragedy it deserves study and understanding.  In The Perversion of V...

It’s not a morbid curiosity (or maybe it is).  One of the key aspects of suicide work is the psychological autopsy or fatality review.  It’s an attempt to understand the intent of someone who died to determine whether their death was an accident – or ...

It is always interesting to read about the right way to do things from authors that acknowledge nothing is foolproof.  The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment explains a process – one which admittedly doesn’t have empirical support.  It also acknowledges that ...

Aaron (Tim) Beck, Harvey Resnik, and Dan Lettieri are the editors of The Prediction of Suicide .  The assembled work brings together the best minds in the prediction of suicide in 1974.  The arguments made then are like the arguments that could be m...

When you read a lot, you start to realize that many books fall into a common pattern.  They offer small enhancements on what you already know – that is, until you find the book that causes you to rethink what you know.  That’s what Rethinking Suicide: Why P...

State of the art doesn’t move as quickly in some places as we’d like to believe.  Much of the technology in aviation is half a century old.  Much of what we know and believe about suicide has a similarly lengthy history.  It’s in that context that I p...

It’s an unfortunate reality that we can’t escape.  The odds are likely that you’ll know someone who dies by suicide – even if you don’t know their death was suicide.  The truth is that we’ve had A Sadly Troubled History with suicide.  For centuries,...

Reading about suicide through the lens of an author about the death of another author isn’t where I’d normally start.  However, The Savage God was referred to by both The Suicidal Mind and Myths about Suicide , so it was clearly a work that held...

It’s not multiple personality disorder (now called “dissociative identity disorder”), but it’s odd when the author of the book refers to the pen name from previous books in the third person.  In Secrets of Suicide , Dr. Ken Tullis reveals that he’s als...

What are the forces that drive suicide?  How is it that we’re reducing the material suffering of the globe (albeit too slowly), yet suicide rates are going up?  Ronald Maris shared his work Social Forces in Urban Suicide back in 1969.  Admittedly, it’s...

I’ve never met a suicide survivor who wanted to congratulate the person they lost on a great decision.  Universally, the word that they wanted to tell them was “Stay.”  That’s why Stay: A History of Suicide and Philosophies Against It was so intere...

After someone close to you commits suicide, the nearly universal response is to try to understand what they were thinking. How did they come to view suicide as the only (or best) option? That's the question that The Suicidal Mind seeks to answer. What...

Understanding the suicidal person is at the heart of prevention.  If you don’t understand them, how can you help them?  The Suicidal Person: A New Look at a Human Phenomenon examines the suicidal person while retaining their humanity.  Instead of s...

Suicide has changed across the millennia of human existence, and it is changing across generations.  Suicide Across the Life Span: Premature Exits walks us through what we know about both the history of suicide and how generations experience and interact ...

It’s a concerning question for parents of children who are considered “gifted” intellectually.  Suicide Among Gifted Children and Adolescents: Understanding the Suicidal Mind doesn’t answer the question about whether these children are more or less ...

Suicide and Homicide: Some Economic, Sociological and Psychological Aspects of Aggression proposes that both suicide and homicide are acts of aggression that flow through different channels based on either external or internal constraints.  There are ...

They don’t know what to say.  My friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are at a loss for words when I tell them of our son’s death by suicide.  While suicide ends the suffering of the person completing the act, it transfers that pain to those who survi...

The idea that suicide is a global health problem isn’t new.  Many organizations had noticed the ongoing and escalating problem of suicide, and in 1989, the World Health Organization published Suicide and Its Prevention: The Role of Attitude and Imitation ....

It’s a curiosity.  The suicide rate in Denmark is very high.  The suicide rate in Norway is low.  At least they were in the early 1960s, when Herbert Hendin was doing his research.  The rates today are substantially similar to each other.  Back then, ...

We’re trapped in a view of suicide that conceptualizes it as a psychological problem.  We can’t see how to integrate multiple views of the problem from separate sociological and psychological standpoints.  Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on th...

It’s dangerous to look at a multifaceted problem like suicide from a single lens, but if you had to pick a single view, Suicide as Psychache is a better place than most.  Before continuing, it’s important to recognize that Edward Shneidman is credited with...

How could you not wonder what you could have done differently when someone you love dies by suicide?  How are you supposed to feel?  How do you cope?  The Suicide Club: What to Do When Someone You Love Chooses Death is Alexandra Wyman’s story of pain...

There’s a yearning on the part of those who have encountered suicide.  It’s a yearning for answers.  Answers to questions like how can I know that someone is at risk?  What do I do to minimize someone’s risk?  And how would I treat someone who is at ris...

Years ago, I was doing a conference in the Union Square area of San Francisco, and I received a warning about the homeless in the area.  During the day, things were fine; but I shouldn’t go walking alone at night, because many of the homeless in the ar...

I had picked up The Suicide Lawyers some time ago but hadn’t read it.  I have friends and clients who are attorneys.  I like them.  I couldn’t really understand why I hadn’t read the book.  Then I realized that there was some sense of disconnect between t...

What we wouldn’t do to be able to classify suicidal risk over someone’s life.  The ability to see when a person is – and isn’t – suicidal would be a great boon to our work to prevent needless deaths.  This is the grand vision to which Suicide Over the Li...

Thomas Szasz was a controversial and sometimes contrarian personality who ended his own life in 2012 following a fall.  Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine lays out a set of criticisms on mainstream medicine for the way that suicide is approached.  H...

Suicide is the most destructive thing that most people will encounter.  It can destroy families.  But It can save others.  It can also be a powerful statement that can be used to transform the world.  The question that Suicide: The Social Causes of Sel...

Ultimately, what people want is to know how to respond to loved ones, colleagues, and community who are potentially suicidal in a way that helps them to recognize their value and allows them to make the decision to continue living.  Suicide: Understanding ...

In suicide, man uses his power and intelligence to destroy that power and intelligence.  In doing so, he removes his sadness and desperation and replaces it with the suffering and grief of those who cared for him.  So starts the journey into Theory o...

What started here would eventually become brief cognitive-behavioral therapy for suicide prevention (BCBT-SP).  In Treating Suicidal Behavior: An Effective, Time-Limited Approach , David Rudd, Thomas Joiner, and Hasan Rajab review what works in therapy ...

What better way to understand the suicidal mind than to hear the stories of those who attempted suicide, failed, and decided to share their experiences? That's the heart of Turning Points: An Extraordinary Journey into the Suicidal Mind . The journey...

As a cisgender, old, white guy, I have no doubt that I come from a different place than Alexandre Baril in Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide .  I’ve had the honor of sitting on a few diversity panels as...

Perhaps the hardest thing that I must do in my professional career is disagree with those whom I deeply respect.  In The Varieties of Suicidal Experience , I find that Thomas Joiner sometimes takes positions that I don’t believe fit the evidence – and ...

You never know how fate is going to deal a hand.  In the case of Rory O’Conner, he was going to be led towards suicide research only to find that the person who led him there would die by his own hand.  O’Conner wrote When It Is Darkest: Why People Die b...

I never claimed to be an expert on suicide, but I had been trained with some screening criteria. It wasn't much more than, "Here are the things to look for, and here's what you do," but it seemed like enough. I found out it wasn't enough when our son,...