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Delivery rates and Return policy Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide Paperback – 10 October 2000
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Critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand the tragic epidemic of suicide—”a powerful book [that] will change people's lives—and, doubtless, save a few" (Newsday).
The first major book in a quarter century on suicide—and its terrible pull on the young in particular—Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.
From the author of the best-selling memoir, An Unquiet Mind—and an internationally acknowledged authority on depression—Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind.
The first major book in a quarter century on suicide—and its terrible pull on the young in particular—Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.
From the author of the best-selling memoir, An Unquiet Mind—and an internationally acknowledged authority on depression—Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind.
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication date10 October 2000
- ISBN-100375701478
- ISBN-13978-0375701474
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Review
"Jamison writes with authority, clarity and clinical reserve. Powerful as her medicine is, her poetic accounting of this dark death is more affecting still."—Baltimore Sun
"Jamison brings us face to face with the suicidal mind in a manner so intense and penetrating that, paradoxically, the immersion in despair she offers is a source of great pleasure."—The Washington Post Book World
"This powerful book will change people's lives—and, doubtless, save a few."—Newsday
"A profound and impassioned book—it will stand as the authoritative study of suicide for many years."—William Styron, author of Darkness Visible
"[Jamison] writes not only in fierce opposition to suicide, but also in passionate vindication of life."—The New York Times Book Review
"Jamison brings us face to face with the suicidal mind in a manner so intense and penetrating that, paradoxically, the immersion in despair she offers is a source of great pleasure."—The Washington Post Book World
"This powerful book will change people's lives—and, doubtless, save a few."—Newsday
"A profound and impassioned book—it will stand as the authoritative study of suicide for many years."—William Styron, author of Darkness Visible
"[Jamison] writes not only in fierce opposition to suicide, but also in passionate vindication of life."—The New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
From the author of the best-selling memoir An Unquiet Mind, comes the first major book in a quarter century on suicide, and its terrible pull on the young in particular. Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.
An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.
An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.
About the Author
KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, and Touched with Fire. She is coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness and author or coauthor of more than one hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psychopharmacology. Dr. Jamison, the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Summer evenings at the Bistro Gardens in Beverly Hills tended toward the long and languorous. My friend Jack Ryan and I went there often when I lived in Los Angeles, and I invariably ordered the Dungeness crab and a scotch on the rocks. Not so invariably, but from time to time, Jack would use the occasion to suggest we get married. It was an idea with such patent potential for catastrophe that neither of us had much of an inclination to take the recurring proposal with too much gravity. But our friendship we took seriously.
This particular evening, having hooked and tugged out the last bits of crab, I found myself edgily knocking the ice cubes around in my whisky glass. The conversation was making me restless and uneasy. We were talking about suicide and making a blood oath: if either of us again became deeply suicidal, we agreed, we would meet at Jack's home on Cape Cod. Once there, the nonsuicidal one of us would have a week to persuade the other not to commit suicide; a week to present all the reasons we could come up with for why the other should go back on lithium, assuming that having stopped it was the most likely reason for the danger of suicide (we both had manic-depressive illness and, despite the better and often expressed judgment of others, had a tendency to stop taking our lithium); a week to cajole the other into a hospital; to invoke conscience; to impress upon the other the pain and damage to our families that suicide would inevitably bring.
We would, we said, during this hostage week, walk along the beach and remind the other of all of the times we had felt at the end of hope and, somehow, had come back. Who, if not someone who had actually been there, could better bring the other back from the edge? We both, in our own ways and in our own intimate dealings with it, knew suicide well. We thought we knew how we could keep it from being the cause of death on our death certificates.
We decided that a week was long enough to argue for life. If it didn't work, at least we would have tried. And, because we had years of cumulative experience with lifestyles of snap impetuousness and knew how quick and final a suicidal impulse could be, we further agreed that neither of us would ever buy a gun. Nor, we swore, would we under any circumstances allow anyone else to keep a gun in a house in which we lived.
"Cheers," we said in synchrony, ice and glass clinking. We sealed our foray into the planned and rational world. Still, I had my doubts. I listened to the details, helped clarify a few, drank the rest of my scotch, and stared at the tiny white lights in the gardens around us. Who were we kidding? Never once, during any of my sustained bouts of suicidal depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. Not once. It wasn't in me. How could I seriously imagine that I would call Jack, make an airline reservation, get to an airport, rent a car, and find my way out to his house on the Cape? It seemed only slightly less absurd that Jack would go along with the plan, although he, at least, was rich and could get others to handle the practicalities. The more I thought about the arrangement, the more skeptical I became.
It is a tribute to the persuasiveness, reverberating energies and enthusiasms, and infinite capacity for self-deception of two manic temperaments that by the time the dessert soufflés arrived we were utterly convinced that our pact would hold. He would call me; I would call him; we would outmaneuver the black knight and force him from the board.
If it has ever been taken up as an option, however, the black knight has a tendency to remain in play. And so it did. Many years later -- Jack had long since married and I had moved to Washington -- I received a telephone call from California: Jack had put a gun to his head, said a member of his family, and "put a bullet through his brain."
No week in Cape Cod, no chance to dissuade. A man who had been inventive enough to earn a thousand patents for such wildly diverse creations as the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems used by the U.S. Department of Defense, toys played with by millions of children around the world, and devices used in virtually every household in America; a Yale graduate and lover of life; a successful businessman -- this remarkably imaginative man had not been inventive enough to find an alternative solution to a violent, self-inflicted death.
Although shaken by Jack's suicide, I was not surprised by it. Nor was I surprised that he had not called me. I, after all, had been dangerously suicidal myself on several occasions since our Bistro Gardens pact and certainly had not called him. Nor had I even thought of calling. Suicide is not beholden to an evening's promises, nor does it always hearken to plans drawn up in lucid moments and banked in good intentions.
I know this for an unfortunate fact. Suicide has been a professional interest of mine for more than twenty years, and a very personal one for considerably longer. I have a hard-earned respect for suicide's ability to undermine, overwhelm, outwit, devastate, and destroy. As a clinician, researcher, and teacher I have known or consulted on patients who hanged, shot, or asphyxiated themselves; jumped to their deaths from stairwells, buildings, or overpasses; died from poisons, fumes, prescription drugs; or slashed their wrists or cut their throats. Close friends, fellow students from graduate school, colleagues, and children of colleagues have done similar or the same. Most were young and suffered from severe illness; all left behind a wake of unimaginable pain and unresolvable guilt.
Like many who have manic-depressive illness, I have also known suicide in a more private, awful way, and I trace the loss of a fundamental innocence to the day that I first considered suicide as the only solution possible to an unendurable level of mental pain. Until that time I had taken for granted, and loved more than I knew, a temperamental lightness of mood and a fabulous expectation of life. I knew death only in the most abstract of senses; I never imagined it would be something to arrange or seek.
I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way. For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells; discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load my father's gun. It was not the kind of education one expected to receive in high school.
The rest of my life at the time -- sports, classes, writing, friends, planning for college -- fell fast into a black night. Everything seemed a ridiculous charade to endure; a hollow existence to fake
one's way through as best one could. But, gradually, layer by layer, the depression lifted, and by the time my senior prom and graduation came around, I had been well for months. Suicide had withdrawn to the back squares of the board and become, once again, unthinkable.
Chillingly, although the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably frightening.
Over the years, my manic-depressive illness became much worse, and the reality of dying young from suicide became a dangerous undertow in my dealings with life. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, after a damaging and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility, if not a probability, in my life.
Under the circumstances -- I was, during this, a young faculty member in a department of academic psychiatry -- it was not a very long walk from personal experience to clinical and scientific investigation. I studied everything I could about my disease and read all I could find about the psychological and biological determinants of suicide. As a tiger tamer learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the moods of death.
Summer evenings at the Bistro Gardens in Beverly Hills tended toward the long and languorous. My friend Jack Ryan and I went there often when I lived in Los Angeles, and I invariably ordered the Dungeness crab and a scotch on the rocks. Not so invariably, but from time to time, Jack would use the occasion to suggest we get married. It was an idea with such patent potential for catastrophe that neither of us had much of an inclination to take the recurring proposal with too much gravity. But our friendship we took seriously.
This particular evening, having hooked and tugged out the last bits of crab, I found myself edgily knocking the ice cubes around in my whisky glass. The conversation was making me restless and uneasy. We were talking about suicide and making a blood oath: if either of us again became deeply suicidal, we agreed, we would meet at Jack's home on Cape Cod. Once there, the nonsuicidal one of us would have a week to persuade the other not to commit suicide; a week to present all the reasons we could come up with for why the other should go back on lithium, assuming that having stopped it was the most likely reason for the danger of suicide (we both had manic-depressive illness and, despite the better and often expressed judgment of others, had a tendency to stop taking our lithium); a week to cajole the other into a hospital; to invoke conscience; to impress upon the other the pain and damage to our families that suicide would inevitably bring.
We would, we said, during this hostage week, walk along the beach and remind the other of all of the times we had felt at the end of hope and, somehow, had come back. Who, if not someone who had actually been there, could better bring the other back from the edge? We both, in our own ways and in our own intimate dealings with it, knew suicide well. We thought we knew how we could keep it from being the cause of death on our death certificates.
We decided that a week was long enough to argue for life. If it didn't work, at least we would have tried. And, because we had years of cumulative experience with lifestyles of snap impetuousness and knew how quick and final a suicidal impulse could be, we further agreed that neither of us would ever buy a gun. Nor, we swore, would we under any circumstances allow anyone else to keep a gun in a house in which we lived.
"Cheers," we said in synchrony, ice and glass clinking. We sealed our foray into the planned and rational world. Still, I had my doubts. I listened to the details, helped clarify a few, drank the rest of my scotch, and stared at the tiny white lights in the gardens around us. Who were we kidding? Never once, during any of my sustained bouts of suicidal depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. Not once. It wasn't in me. How could I seriously imagine that I would call Jack, make an airline reservation, get to an airport, rent a car, and find my way out to his house on the Cape? It seemed only slightly less absurd that Jack would go along with the plan, although he, at least, was rich and could get others to handle the practicalities. The more I thought about the arrangement, the more skeptical I became.
It is a tribute to the persuasiveness, reverberating energies and enthusiasms, and infinite capacity for self-deception of two manic temperaments that by the time the dessert soufflés arrived we were utterly convinced that our pact would hold. He would call me; I would call him; we would outmaneuver the black knight and force him from the board.
If it has ever been taken up as an option, however, the black knight has a tendency to remain in play. And so it did. Many years later -- Jack had long since married and I had moved to Washington -- I received a telephone call from California: Jack had put a gun to his head, said a member of his family, and "put a bullet through his brain."
No week in Cape Cod, no chance to dissuade. A man who had been inventive enough to earn a thousand patents for such wildly diverse creations as the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems used by the U.S. Department of Defense, toys played with by millions of children around the world, and devices used in virtually every household in America; a Yale graduate and lover of life; a successful businessman -- this remarkably imaginative man had not been inventive enough to find an alternative solution to a violent, self-inflicted death.
Although shaken by Jack's suicide, I was not surprised by it. Nor was I surprised that he had not called me. I, after all, had been dangerously suicidal myself on several occasions since our Bistro Gardens pact and certainly had not called him. Nor had I even thought of calling. Suicide is not beholden to an evening's promises, nor does it always hearken to plans drawn up in lucid moments and banked in good intentions.
I know this for an unfortunate fact. Suicide has been a professional interest of mine for more than twenty years, and a very personal one for considerably longer. I have a hard-earned respect for suicide's ability to undermine, overwhelm, outwit, devastate, and destroy. As a clinician, researcher, and teacher I have known or consulted on patients who hanged, shot, or asphyxiated themselves; jumped to their deaths from stairwells, buildings, or overpasses; died from poisons, fumes, prescription drugs; or slashed their wrists or cut their throats. Close friends, fellow students from graduate school, colleagues, and children of colleagues have done similar or the same. Most were young and suffered from severe illness; all left behind a wake of unimaginable pain and unresolvable guilt.
Like many who have manic-depressive illness, I have also known suicide in a more private, awful way, and I trace the loss of a fundamental innocence to the day that I first considered suicide as the only solution possible to an unendurable level of mental pain. Until that time I had taken for granted, and loved more than I knew, a temperamental lightness of mood and a fabulous expectation of life. I knew death only in the most abstract of senses; I never imagined it would be something to arrange or seek.
I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way. For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells; discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load my father's gun. It was not the kind of education one expected to receive in high school.
The rest of my life at the time -- sports, classes, writing, friends, planning for college -- fell fast into a black night. Everything seemed a ridiculous charade to endure; a hollow existence to fake
one's way through as best one could. But, gradually, layer by layer, the depression lifted, and by the time my senior prom and graduation came around, I had been well for months. Suicide had withdrawn to the back squares of the board and become, once again, unthinkable.
Chillingly, although the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably frightening.
Over the years, my manic-depressive illness became much worse, and the reality of dying young from suicide became a dangerous undertow in my dealings with life. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, after a damaging and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility, if not a probability, in my life.
Under the circumstances -- I was, during this, a young faculty member in a department of academic psychiatry -- it was not a very long walk from personal experience to clinical and scientific investigation. I studied everything I could about my disease and read all I could find about the psychological and biological determinants of suicide. As a tiger tamer learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the moods of death.
Product details
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375701478
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375701474
- Best Sellers Rank: 55,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 66 in Mood Disorders
- 84 in Family & Lifestyle Depression
- 157 in Anxiety
- Customer reviews:
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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
369 global ratings
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Top reviews from other countries
Mónica Vega Mejía
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely necessary
Reviewed in Mexico on 10 April 2018Verified Purchase
One of the most important books on the subject. It addresses the suicide issue from many perspectives and, ultimately, offers understanding.
mhasfaria
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must Read Piece on Suicide
Reviewed in India on 22 October 2017Verified Purchase
This is my first reading on suicide topic as I am working on body of knowledge of youth suicide in South India. By the time I finished reading it, I was so glad that I picked this one to start my work with. Not only the knowledge provided in this book are very extensive and comprehensive but also it was able to connect with many research that had been done in the past to support the current situation of suicide's stands related to various things such as the effect of different medications on people with mood disorders that might or might not associate with having suicidal thoughts, the ramification of suicide in different countries like when it was criminalized and decriminalized, existing suicide preventions approach and its effectiveness, etc. As someone without any psychological nor mental health's background, and came from international relations and political science' background and works for many years on policy research and communication as well as advocacy, this book had done a tremendous work to help me coming with a better understanding to approach youth suicide in South India from public policy perspective. In addition to that, the author also provides extensive list of references for each chapter that will be extremely useful for those who wants to do further readings and research on particular topics around suicide.
Umer Vakil
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Behold, I am a dry tree" - Isaiah 56:3
Reviewed in the United States on 30 June 2015Verified Purchase
Undeniably, the unique strength of this book comes from the author's intimacy while dealing with the topic. It is one thing to be an outsider observing a phenomenon and someone who has both experienced it, observed it and studied it for a good deal of their lives. This book is authoritative, detailed and incredibly comprehensive. If you ever had to read a book on this topic, it would be this - there is a seldom an aspect of suicide Jamison doesn't touch upon - history, culture, psychology, neurobiology, personal accounts. Furthermore, her courage to write about a topic that involves interviewing people about the most private and devastating moments of their lives is commendable. This is excluding the resilience one needs to devote a career to studying manic-depressive illness - a primary cause of suicide - and continuously witnessing such events and again and again, not to mention escaping its clutches herself in her own earlier life.
What is intriguing about suicide is how it's peculiar to humans - for example, how it can be a product of the human ability to self-reflect and ruminate. From the evolutionary perspective, it is strange that this disposition towards ending one's own life (i.e. depression) has remained in the gene pool. Redfield talks about the possible altruistic notions of suicide - in the Eskimos, Norse, Samoan and Crow Indians, it is acceptable as an act of self-sacrifice among elderly and the sick. In Nomadic tribes, anyone slowing you down reduces your chance of survival. But if you move from the hereditary to the genetic - it turns out that the question of genes is a significantly difficult one. Are there specific genes for suicide, a result of genetically passed dispositions (including addiction, aggression and so forth), or disposition towards mental illnesses that cause suicide? Maybe, it's a more of a random product of DNA arrangement. As usual, the hereditary questions are relatively easier to answer than those regarding the genetic mechanisms that govern them.
That isn't the only problem with the science of suicide - the statistics and surveys are hard to capture information from, and analyze them properly. Suicide continues to be underreported, although there has been tremendous progress in decreasing this. When it comes to clinical drug trials, suicidal patients are almost always excluded so it's hard to make compelling studies between suicidal behavior and antidepressants.
The book talks a lot about mental illnesses such as depression, manic-depression and schizophrenia, but makes sure not to delve into them so its feels like a repetition of a course in abnormal psychology - it sticks to its own domain of suicide, regardless of the degree of overlap between psychopathology and suicide. It talks about many things that you can find in standard suicide text and manuals: risk factors, methods of suicide. This description is slight unfair...this book doesn't read like a manual, scientific and cultural commentary chapters are alternated with very intimate accounts: there are tragic mentions of suicide notes, but the book isn't about sympathy, there is an entire chapter on how effective suicide notes are effective in determining suicidal intentions, recreating the completer's psychological state of mind before suicide.
The book is a must read for anyone, probably because nearly anyone who is uninformed about suicide is bound to have views based on false notions or misinformation surround the topic: People are shocked at successful people committing suicide ("Why did they kill themselves if they had it good?" without knowing that manic-depression targets the successful and academically high achieving more than the normal population. It mainly strikes in college years, and for reasons such as this that college's need well managed mental health infrastructure almost as much as other facilities such as athletic buildings and libraries. After reading this book, you'll feel antsy about WHY there isn't more aggressive drive towards improving suicide awareness, especially due to its prevalent in school years.
The last chapter of the book is incredibly important as I feel that it had something that was missing from other books about suicide. Whereas most books place emphasis the individual, Jamison talks about societal views and especially recommending media and journalistic ethics - something important in our (unfortunately) hyper-reporting-dependent society: not presenting simplistic explanations for suicide, repetitive reporting, "how-to" descriptions of suicide, glorification of suicide and perhaps the most counter-intuitive idea - that we should NOT focus on completer's positive characteristics too much ("he/she had a bright future") because it may make suicide attractive to people at risk who aren't as well performing.
Books such as these are terribly important because they can act as tools to slowly chip away at the stigma associated with suicide, especially those in religious communities. In Abrahamic religions that take up most of the world's population, there are no burial rights for suicides. Lastly, I shouldn't forget to mention that for a lawmaker, her policy recommendations give an imperative insight into what a society should be doing to tackle a phenomenon like suicide.
I loved reading this book and didn't find it even boring in the slightest although I had nothing to benefit from it personally, professionally or academically. It's interesting simply due to its power to make someone into an informed citizen simply by capturing his or her curiosity. There isn't anything to complain about in this book - except that I hope that she discussed the philosophy of suicide more before considering there is endless debate on the bravery vs. cowardice and undesirability of this option. (Camus said "There is only one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide".)
A brilliant, personal, well-written and studied book!
What is intriguing about suicide is how it's peculiar to humans - for example, how it can be a product of the human ability to self-reflect and ruminate. From the evolutionary perspective, it is strange that this disposition towards ending one's own life (i.e. depression) has remained in the gene pool. Redfield talks about the possible altruistic notions of suicide - in the Eskimos, Norse, Samoan and Crow Indians, it is acceptable as an act of self-sacrifice among elderly and the sick. In Nomadic tribes, anyone slowing you down reduces your chance of survival. But if you move from the hereditary to the genetic - it turns out that the question of genes is a significantly difficult one. Are there specific genes for suicide, a result of genetically passed dispositions (including addiction, aggression and so forth), or disposition towards mental illnesses that cause suicide? Maybe, it's a more of a random product of DNA arrangement. As usual, the hereditary questions are relatively easier to answer than those regarding the genetic mechanisms that govern them.
That isn't the only problem with the science of suicide - the statistics and surveys are hard to capture information from, and analyze them properly. Suicide continues to be underreported, although there has been tremendous progress in decreasing this. When it comes to clinical drug trials, suicidal patients are almost always excluded so it's hard to make compelling studies between suicidal behavior and antidepressants.
The book talks a lot about mental illnesses such as depression, manic-depression and schizophrenia, but makes sure not to delve into them so its feels like a repetition of a course in abnormal psychology - it sticks to its own domain of suicide, regardless of the degree of overlap between psychopathology and suicide. It talks about many things that you can find in standard suicide text and manuals: risk factors, methods of suicide. This description is slight unfair...this book doesn't read like a manual, scientific and cultural commentary chapters are alternated with very intimate accounts: there are tragic mentions of suicide notes, but the book isn't about sympathy, there is an entire chapter on how effective suicide notes are effective in determining suicidal intentions, recreating the completer's psychological state of mind before suicide.
The book is a must read for anyone, probably because nearly anyone who is uninformed about suicide is bound to have views based on false notions or misinformation surround the topic: People are shocked at successful people committing suicide ("Why did they kill themselves if they had it good?" without knowing that manic-depression targets the successful and academically high achieving more than the normal population. It mainly strikes in college years, and for reasons such as this that college's need well managed mental health infrastructure almost as much as other facilities such as athletic buildings and libraries. After reading this book, you'll feel antsy about WHY there isn't more aggressive drive towards improving suicide awareness, especially due to its prevalent in school years.
The last chapter of the book is incredibly important as I feel that it had something that was missing from other books about suicide. Whereas most books place emphasis the individual, Jamison talks about societal views and especially recommending media and journalistic ethics - something important in our (unfortunately) hyper-reporting-dependent society: not presenting simplistic explanations for suicide, repetitive reporting, "how-to" descriptions of suicide, glorification of suicide and perhaps the most counter-intuitive idea - that we should NOT focus on completer's positive characteristics too much ("he/she had a bright future") because it may make suicide attractive to people at risk who aren't as well performing.
Books such as these are terribly important because they can act as tools to slowly chip away at the stigma associated with suicide, especially those in religious communities. In Abrahamic religions that take up most of the world's population, there are no burial rights for suicides. Lastly, I shouldn't forget to mention that for a lawmaker, her policy recommendations give an imperative insight into what a society should be doing to tackle a phenomenon like suicide.
I loved reading this book and didn't find it even boring in the slightest although I had nothing to benefit from it personally, professionally or academically. It's interesting simply due to its power to make someone into an informed citizen simply by capturing his or her curiosity. There isn't anything to complain about in this book - except that I hope that she discussed the philosophy of suicide more before considering there is endless debate on the bravery vs. cowardice and undesirability of this option. (Camus said "There is only one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide".)
A brilliant, personal, well-written and studied book!
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K. S. Culling
5.0 out of 5 stars
There is no better book to help you understand...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 July 2004Verified Purchase
...help you understand your self, or help you understand a suicidal person you care about.
Although medical professionals may read it, it is a book for anyone and easy to comprehend and feel emotional about.
I know a lot about suicide. It's a subject I have studied for all the wrong reasons since I was a kid. It nearly killed me.
I first read Dr K.R.Jamison's book when I was extremely ill, and it made me feel understood. It opened my eyes about some of my depressed thinking, just long enough to hesitate and live. It also brought home to me, the consequences of taking my life. It didn't always stop me trying to kill myself, but it mostly did. It certainly put me off some of the more gruesome ways to end life.
This book covers dark topics, it has to. It is difficult to read about peoples' pain, and frightening for all. But the book itself reads easily and informs absolutely. I recommend it highly.
Although medical professionals may read it, it is a book for anyone and easy to comprehend and feel emotional about.
I know a lot about suicide. It's a subject I have studied for all the wrong reasons since I was a kid. It nearly killed me.
I first read Dr K.R.Jamison's book when I was extremely ill, and it made me feel understood. It opened my eyes about some of my depressed thinking, just long enough to hesitate and live. It also brought home to me, the consequences of taking my life. It didn't always stop me trying to kill myself, but it mostly did. It certainly put me off some of the more gruesome ways to end life.
This book covers dark topics, it has to. It is difficult to read about peoples' pain, and frightening for all. But the book itself reads easily and informs absolutely. I recommend it highly.
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ttn3j
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great comprehensive work on suicide
Reviewed in Japan on 4 June 2002Verified Purchase
"Night Falls Fast" by Kay R. Jamison contains various aspects of suicide in a wide range, from humanity to the latest brain science. Also, essays on suicide by the author are full of English literature flavor, telling us how sad suicide is. As a specialist book and as a literature work, I recommend "Night Falls Fast", which gives us a deep insight on suicide.
6 people found this helpful
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