Resources & Links
- Physician-Assisted Suicide: American Medical AssociationPhysician-assisted suicide occurs when a physician facilitates a patient’s death by providing the necessary means and/or information to enable the patient to perform the life-ending act (e.g., the physician provides sleeping pills and information about the lethal dose, while aware that the patient may commit suicide).
- Suicide: National Institute of Mental HealthSuicide is a major public health concern. Suicide is among the leading causes of death in the United States. Based on recent mortality data, suicide in some populations is on the rise.
- Suicide Prevention: Centers for Disease Control and PreventionSuicide is death caused by injuring oneself with the intent to die. A suicide attempt is when someone harms themselves with any intent to end their life, but they do not die as a result of their actions.
Research & Reference
- Assisted Suicide: Points of View Reference CenterThe article discusses the issues surrounding the concept of assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is considered as a medical and ethical issue where a physician allows and helps a patient decide on the time and circumstances of his or her death. The debates over the practice of assisted suicide in the U.S. are explored. The history of assisted suicide in the country is also discussed, along with definition of terms related to it.
- Suicide: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on suicide. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Streaming Media
- Suicide & Self-Harm: Helping People at Risk with Linda GaskAs mental health professionals, there is no way for us to know who is going to commit suicide, but learning to successfully assess risk and address threats will greatly improve the chance that we can prevent it from happening.
- Understanding and Preventing Suicide: By The Glendon AssociationHow can you know if your family member or friend may be suicidal? How do you recognize the warning signs? How can you help? This video program for the public describes the risk factors and warning signs of suicide and offers guidelines from experts in suicide prevention and treatment for getting troubled loved ones to the professional help they need. You’ll also hear from three individuals who have made serious suicide attempts and lived, as they share their remarkable stories of self-destructiveness, survival, and recovery.
- Voices of Suicide: Learning from Those who LivedIn this documentary style educational program for mental health professionals, interviews from expert psychologists provide important insights into the relationship between early developmental experiences and the later psychological states that lead to suicidal behavior.
Perspectives
Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.
Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth
In an original and provocative study of suicide, Ian Marsh examines the historical and cultural forces that have influenced contemporary thought, practices and policy in relation to this serious public health problem. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the book tells the story of how suicide has come to be seen as first and foremost a matter of psychiatric concern. Marsh sets out to challenge the assumptions and certainties embedded in our beliefs, attitudes and practices concerning suicide and the suicidal, and the resulting account unsettles and informs in equal measure. The book will be of particular interest to researchers, professionals and students in psychology, history, sociology and the health sciences.
Suicide Prevention in Schools
Argues that schools have a much larger role to play in the prevention of suicide among children and adolescents than they have generally undertaken hitherto. Sets out various ways in which teachers can detect suicidal tendencies and make appropriate interventions.
Myths about Suicide
Around the world, more than a million people die by suicide each year. Yet many of us know very little about a tragedy that may strike our own loved ones-and much of what we think we know is wrong. This clear and powerful book dismantles myth after myth to bring compassionate and accurate understanding of a massive international killer.Drawing on a fascinating array of clinical cases, media reports, literary works, and scientific studies, Thomas Joiner demolishes both moralistic and psychotherapeutic clichÉs. He shows that suicide is not easy, cowardly, vengeful, or selfish. It is not a manifestation of "suppressed rage" or a side effect of medication. Threats of suicide, far from being idle, are often followed by serious attempts. People who are prevented once from killing themselves will not necessarily try again.The risk for suicide, Joiner argues, is partly genetic and is influenced by often agonizing mental disorders. Vulnerability to suicide may be anticipated and treated. Most important, suicide can be prevented.An eminent expert whose own father's death by suicide changed his life, Joiner is relentless in his pursuit of the truth about suicide and deeply sympathetic to such tragic waste of life and the pain it causes those left behind.
Against Physician Assisted Suicide
The majority of doctors and nurses involved in specialist palliative care reject the legalisation of physician assisted suicide (PAS). This book explores the reasons why the healthcare professionals who have the most experience of caring for dying patients should object to a change in the law. Debate about euthanasia and PAS often arises in response to a well publicised tragic case of unrelieved suffering. Such heart rending stories do not reflect the fact that the majority of people dying have a dignified death. There is a marked disparity between medical intuitions and the philosophers' arguments about euthanasia and PAS. It seems that part of the moral constitution of a doctor is a commitment not to intend the death of a patient and to protect them from harm. The perspective of those who are privileged to care for thousands of dying patients and their families should inform the debate about PAS.This book will enable those who are not working within palliative care to gain an insight into the scope of this speciality and to understand why legalisation of PAS should be resisted to maintain and improve care of dying patients.
College Student Suicide
Here is the first single book to exclusively address this tragic behavior. From the foreword by Dr. C. Everett Koop to the final conclusions and recommendations, College Student Suicide serves as both a primer and a state-of-the-art volume on youth suicide in the higher education setting. Experts provide important data on suicide, examine the risk factors for suicide, and explore preventive interventions and the delivery of other necessary services. Highly valuable reading for the entire college or university community, this major new book is particularly recommended for college and university faculty and administrators, residence hall directors, residence assistants, health center staff, parents of college students, and students themselves.
Youth Suicide
Issues, assessment, and intervention