Essential Papers on Suicide

by John T. Maltsberger (Editor), Mark Goldblatt (Editor)

An exploration of the motivations, characteristics, and psychology of suicide

Why do people take their own lives? How can clinicians best plan and carry out intelligent treatment of desperate patients who are giving up on themselves?

Suicide, its motivations, characteristics, and psychology are explicated in these papers by the most experienced and renowned experts on the subject. A definitive volume, Essential Papers on Suicide features the work of Ernest Jones; Kate Friedlander; George Murphy, R. H. Wilkinson, S. Gassner, and J. Kayes; Joseph C. Sabbath; Robert E. Litman; Milton Rosenbaum; Charles Swearingen; Avery D. Weisman; Mervin Glasser, Egl Laufer, Moses Laufer and Myer Wohl; Donald A. Schwartz, Don E. Flinn and Paul F. Slawson; Aaron T. Beck, Maria Kovacs and Arlene Weissman; Marie sberg, Lil Traskman and Peter Thoren; Stuart Asch; John T. Maltsberger; Alex D. Pokorny; Erna Furman; Cynthia R. Pfeffer, Robert Plutchik, Mark S. Mizruchi and Robert Lipkins; Myrna M. Weissman, Gerald L. Klerman, Jeffrey S. Markowitz and R. Oullette; Jan Fawcett, William A. Scheftner, Louis Fogg, David C. Clark, Michael A. Young, Don Hedeker, and Robert Gibbons, among others.

Genres: Psychology

280 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ben]

Some Aspects of Suicide - Gregory Zilboorg

If I chastise myself a great deal and if I try to cut my throat and if I become unconscious, or if I develop a severe illness like typhoid fever or malaria or the flu, I serve my sentence and I can afford to walk out into the world with a sort of martyrlike satisfaction that I got the licking I deserved. If, however, my depression goes on very nicely, and my doctor is very good to me and says, "Don't think you are so bad, you are not bad at all," and gives me so-called encouragement, the chief therapy we know, then the situation is terrible. It is based on the fact that we ourselves are afraid of our own aggression and when we see how the patient handles it we say, "Shut up; don't tell us. You are not so bad after all. You are good. You were a good mother because you have healthy daughters." But when the patient says she has been a bad mother to her daughter, the patient is thinking in terms of how she hates her daughter as she hated her mother, and wants to kill the daughter the way she wanted to kill the mother. And when you tell her she is good, the only thing she can do is to increase her depression to show that your suggestion that she is good is a devilish insinuation and comes from Lucifer. This is where so-called encouragement in depression is courting suicide. But if you let a depression live itself out, down to its utmost depth, short of letting the patient make a fatal attempt at suicide, that depression having served the sentence will recover gradually and normally. If you let the depression go on with encouragement and adulation so that it becomes, in a sense, a psychological prison sentence, then the individual begins to emerge from the depression with severe charges of hostility that have not been lived out on his own self, and the moment this individual is left alone and wants to kill that environment he has been forced into he will kill himself. We could almost measure the dose of illness in terms of so many cubic centimeters, so many cc's in the degree of hostility almost lived out and so many cc's to be lived out. We can and ought to be aware of this mechanism, to be able to tell the dose of suffering, or self-chastisement, so as not to push the depression out too soon and therefore make the patient a candidate for suicide. So when a patient is profoundly depressed, do not tell him he is not going to be depressed. It is like telling a fasting martyr of the 13th Century that it is perfectly all right, but after a 10-day fast you will give him a good meal. The idea of a good meal will be enough to make him at once go to his father confessor and impose upon himself another 40 days of fasting. You increase the depression. It is paradoxical, as you see, from the standpoint of the fact that our reasonable, rational attitude is totally at variance with, if not contradictory to, the logic of the emotional constellations of the mentally sick individual; but the mentally sick individual is mentally sick because it is an emotional logic disrespective of any rational logic, which forms the weakest link in human relationships.

[Shirin]

Great collection of mostly short to medium length papers about a variety of topics related to suicide. There are many inspirational and interesting papers in this book that give one hope in taking care of suicidal patients.