With recent studies using genetic, epigenetic, and other molecular and neurochemical approaches, a new era has begun in understanding pathophysiology of suicide. Emerging evidence suggests that neurobiological factors are not only critical in providing potential risk factors but also provide a promising approach to develop more effective treatment and prevention strategies. The Neurobiological Basis of Suicide discusses the most recent findings in suicide neurobiology. Psychological, psychosocial, and cultural factors are important in determining the risk factors for suicide; however, they offer weak prediction and can be of little clinical use. Interestingly, cognitive characteristics are different among depressed suicidal and depressed nonsuicidal subjects, and could be involved in the development of suicidal behavior. The characterization of the neurobiological basis of suicide is in delineating the risk factors associated with suicide. The Neurobiological Basis of Suicide focuses on how and why these neurobiological factors are crucial in the pathogenic mechanisms of suicidal behavior and how these findings can be transformed into potential therapeutic applications.

Alessandra Lemma - Winner of the Levy-Goldfarb Award for Child Psychoanalysis! Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide presents original studies and research from contemporary psychoanalysts, therapists and academics focusing on the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide and self-harm, and how this can be applied to clinical work and policy. This powerful critique of current thinking suggests that suicide and self-harm must be understood as having meaning within interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, offering a new and more hopeful dimension for prevention and recovery. Divided into three sections, the book includes: a theoretical overview examples of psychoanalytic practice with self-harming and suicidal patients applications of psychoanalytic thinking to suicide and self-harm prevention. Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide will be helpful to psychoanalytic therapists, analysts and mental health professionals wanting to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into their work with self-harmers and the suicidal. This text will also be of use to academics and professionals involved in suicidal prevention.

Every year, about 30,000 people die by suicide in the U.S., and some 650,000 receive emergency treatment after a suicide attempt. Often, those most at risk are the least able to access professional help. Reducing Suicide provides a blueprint for addressing this tragic and costly problem: how we can build an appropriate infrastructure, conduct needed research, and improve our ability to recognize suicide risk and effectively intervene. Rich in data, the book also strikes an intensely personal chord, featuring compelling quotes about people's experience with suicide. The book explores the factors that raise a person's risk of suicide: psychological and biological factors including substance abuse, the link between childhood trauma and later suicide, and the impact of family life, economic status, religion, and other social and cultural conditions. The authors review the effectiveness of existing interventions, including mental health practitioners' ability to assess suicide risk among patients. They present lessons learned from the Air Force suicide prevention program and other prevention initiatives. And they identify barriers to effective research and treatment. This new volume will be of special interest to policy makers, administrators, researchers, practitioners, and journalists working in the field of mental health.

In this book international experts address a range of key current issues relating to suicide. The opening chapters discuss nosology, definitions, clinical determinants, and conceptual models of the suicide process and consider the evidence regarding potential biomarkers of suicide risk based on neuroscientific research. Adopting a neo-Durkheimian perspective, the role of various social factors in the genesis of suicidal behavior is then explored in depth. Practical user-friendly tools that facilitate risk assessment by clinicians are provided, and detailed consideration is given to efficient and innovative strategies for the prevention of suicide and the treatment of suicidal behavior, such as psychotherapy, psychopharmacological approaches, and effective organization of care, including surveillance and the use of online tools. The final part of the book focuses on the need for and development of a personalized approach within the field of suicide prevention.

When should we try to prevent suicide? Should it be facilitated for some people, in some circumstances? For the last forty years, law and policy on suicide have followed two separate and distinct tracks: laws aimed at preventing suicide and, increasingly, laws aimed at facilitating it. In Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws legal scholar Susan Stefan argues that these laws co-exist because they are based on two radically disparate conceptions of the would-be suicide. This is the first book that unifies policies and laws, including constitutional law, criminal law, malpractice law, and civil commitment law, toward people who want to end their lives. Based on the author's expert understanding of mental health and legal systems, analysis of related national and international laws and policy, and surveys and interviews with more than 300 suicide-attempt survivors, doctors, lawyers, and mental health professionals, Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws exposes the counterproductive nature of current policies and laws about suicide. Stefan proposes and defends specific reforms, including increased protection of mental health professionals from liability, increased protection of suicidal people from coercive interventions, reframing medical involvement in assisted suicide, and focusing on approaches to suicidal people that help them rather than assuming suicidality is always a symptom of mental illness. Stefan compares policies and laws in different states in the U.S. and examines the policies and laws of other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including the 2015 legalization of assisted suicide in Canada. The book includes model statutes, seven in-depth studies of people whose cases presented profound ethical, legal, and policy dilemmas, and over a thousand cases interpreting rights and responsibilities relating to suicide, especially in the area of psychiatric malpractice.

Today's psychiatrists practice in an environment that poses difficult challenges. Both treatment time and duration are limited by insurance requirements; many facilities are understaffed; split treatment arrangements are typical; and high-risk, acutely suicidal patients are admitted to inpatient units for short lengths of stay. In addition, law now plays a pervasive role in the practice of psychiatry. The doctor-patient relationship is no longer defined solely by the involved parties. Clinicians must juggle these requirements and limitations while providing the very best care to their patients, especially those at high risk. Preventing Patient Suicide: Clinical Assessment and Management provides the wisdom of Dr. Robert I. Simon's vast clinical experience, combined with the latest insights from the evidence-based psychiatric literature, to offer a cutting-edge survey of suicide prevention and management techniques. The author: Addresses sudden improvement in high-risk suicidal patients, a phenomenon both common and perilous, with techniques for determining whether the improvement is real or feigned. Explores in depth the misuse of suicide risk assessment forms, with emphasis on their inherent limitations. Examines the many entrenched myths and traditions about suicide, exposing them to the critical light of evidence-based medicine, including the concept of "imminent suicide risk" and the myth of "passive suicide ideation". Discusses the continuum of chronic and acute high-risk suicidal patients, the fluidity with which one can become the other, and the difficulty in assessing these patients. Explores how the law and psychiatry interact in frequently occurring clinical situations, and the importance of therapeutic risk management. In addition, the book contains a variety of features that illuminate the subject and enhance the reader's understanding, including: Inclusion of illustrative case studies, combined with commentary on commonly occurring but complex clinical situations. Key points at the end of each chapter that identify critical information. A Suicide Risk Assessment Self-Test, a teaching instrument that consists of fifty questions designed to enhance clinician suicide risk assessment by incorporating evidence-based risk and protective factors. Dr. Simon provides a nuanced, empathic, yet pragmatic perspective on identifying, assessing, and managing the suicidal patient while successfully navigating a complex legal and clinical environment that poses its own risks to the practitioner.

Writing against the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Whitehead turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. By turns provocative and deeply affecting, this book brings suicide into conversation with the critical medical humanities, extending beyond individual pathology and the medical institution to think about subjective and social perspectives, and to open up the various sites, scenes and interactions with which suicide is associated. Suicide is related forward from the point of death, rather than taking a retrospective view. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection based on her own experience of her sister's suicide, Whitehead examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship.