The author provides the language, not only for understanding the suicidal
mind, but for understanding oneself and the psychological needs of the suicidal
individual. Presenting cases that reveal the inner workings of the suicidal
mind, Shneidman offers an insight to help understand and prevent suicide.Suicide haunts our literature and our culture, claiming the lives of
ordinary people and celebrities alike. It is now the third leading cause of
death for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States, raising
alarms across the nation about the rising tide of hopelessness seen in our
young people. It is a taboo subtext to our successes and our happiness, a dark
issue that is often euphemized, avoided, and little understood. In our century,
psychology and psychiatry alike have attempted to understand, prevent, and
medicalize these phenomena. But they have failed, argues Dr. Edwin Shneidman,
because they have lost sight of the plain language, the ordinary everyday
words, the pain and frustrated psychological needs of the suicidal individual.
In The Suicidal Mind, Dr. Shneidman has written a groundbreaking work for every
person who has ever thought about suicide or knows anybody who has contemplated
it. The book brims with insight into the suicidal impulse and with helpful
suggestions on how to counteract it. Shneidman presents a bold and simple
premise: the main cause of suicide is psychological pain or "psychache."; Thus the key to preventing suicide is not so much the study of the
structure of the brain, or the study of social statistics, or the study of
mental diseases, as it is the direct study of human emotions. To treat a
suicidal individual, we need to identify, address, and reduce the individual's
psychache. Shneidman shares with the reader his knowledge, both as a clinician
and researcher, of the psychological drama that plays itself out in the
suicidal mind through the exploration of three moving case studies. We meet
Ariel, who
