The Definition of Suicide - Couverture rigide

How can one enrich the time remaining in the life of a terminally ill person? What are the emotional, mental and physical stages that precede a suicide attempt? And how can we begin to imagine our own deaths as fitting conclusions to our lives? In Voices of Death, Dr. Edwin Shneidman offers a collection of personal accounts - letters, diaries, interviews, and suicide notes - gathered through years of working with those confronting death. Accompanying these documents is Shneidman's own searching and insightful commentary, enhancing our understanding of the passage toward death. Each story contains glimpses of heroism, hope, and despair. Together, in this honest and compassionate work, they help us learn to face death - our own and of those closest to us - with courage and with grace.

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.