Definition of Suicide

Suicide has reached an alarming level in our society, especially among teenagers and young adults. Based on the author's more than thirty years experience as a clinical suicidologist, this ground-breaking work attempts to redefine our understanding of the true nature of suicide and seeks to help practitioners identify, understand, and treat individuals who seek to kill themselves.Definition of Suicide presents an original set of ten characteristics common in suicide. Detailed explanations of these "Ten Commonalities of Suicide" create an intimate portrait of the suicidal person's emotions, thought, internal attitudes, desires, actions, and inner stresses. Decoding actual suicide notes constructs a deeper understanding of the driving forces behind the act itself. The author draws valuable lessons from literature, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory, illustrated by classics written by Herman Melville, Stephen C. Pepper, Henry A. Murray, and James G. Miller. Deeply insightful, this original book is both a major theoretical treatment of self-destruction and a practical first-aid guide to preventing suicidal deaths.


About the Author
In a career that spanned more than four decades, Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman was the chief of the first national suicide prevention program, at the National Institute of Mental Health; founded the American Association of Suicidology; and was the first professor of thanatology (the study of death) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until Dr. Shneidman took up the study of suicide shortly after World War II, the subject had received little sustained attention from researchers or clinicians. But as a researcher, theoretician, lecturer and author and editor of a dozen books, he helped establish the study of suicide as an interdisciplinary field and devised many concepts now widely accepted.