Globally, suicides account for a significant number of premature deaths every year. Traditional approaches to suicide research and prevention are not working for everyone, but why is this? And what can be done about it? In Critical Suicidology, a team of international scholars, practitioners, and people directly affected by suicide argue that the field of suicidology has become too focused on the biomedical paradigm: a model that pathologizes distress and obscures the social, political, and historical contexts that contribute to human suffering. The authors introduce the perspectives of those who have direct personal knowledge of suicide and suicidal behaviour and propose alternative approaches to suicide prevention that are creative, socially just, and culturally responsive. In the right hands, this book could save lives.

Integrating research from multiple disciplines, this text provides a comprehensive perspective on suicide and examines what works in prevention and intervention. The author is a pioneering researcher and clinician who addresses the classification, prevalence, and assessment of suicide and self-destructive behaviors and explores risk factors at multiple levels, from demographic variables, personality traits, psychiatric diagnoses, and neurobiological factors to the social and cultural context. Student-friendly features include text boxes that dive deeply into specific issues, instructive figures and tables, thought-provoking clinical cases, and engaging examples from literature and popular culture. The text reviews medical and psychosocial treatment and prevention approaches, discusses ways to help those bereaved by suicide, and considers issues of professional liability.

Part of the authoritative Oxford Textbooks in Psychiatry series, the new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Suicidology and Suicide Prevention remains a key text in the field of suicidology, fully updated with new chapters devoted to major psychiatric disorders and their relation to suicide.

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.

Some researchers in the field of suicidology think that the old theories of suicide are too constraining and impede advances in the understanding of suicide. However the book’s authors are not quite so critical of past theories. In the book they review the classic theories of suicide, both psychological and sociological, because they are the foundation of our current theories and also propose the skeletons of possible future theories. The goal of the text is to present researchers with theories to guide their research, encourage them to modify these theories, perhaps meld them together in some cases, and think how they might propose new theories. Presented in three sections, the first reviews significant psychological theories including: Suicide as Escape; Interpersonal-Psychological theory; The Role of Defeat and Entrapment in Suicidal Behavior; Suicide, Ethology and Sociobiology; Stress-Diatheses; Cognitive Theories; Learning Perspective on Suicide; Theories of Personality and Suicide; Typological Theories; and the Pathophysiology of Suicide. The second section of the text addresses Sociological and Economic Theories including: Suicide as Deviance, Naroll’s Thwarting Disorientation Theory, three classic sociological theories as well as several minor theories. A comprehensive chapter on economic theories is offered by Bijou Yang. The final section concentrates on Critical Thoughts About Theories of Suicide, a new and growing influence in academia and scholarship.

Periodically, researchers express concern about the research conducted on suicide. Back in 1966, Merton Kahne criticized the quality of the research, but more recently, some scholars have declared that we have reached our limits in understanding and predicting suicide. Dan Reidenberg recently wrote an editorial entitled "Healthy debate, frustration, or a field in chaos?" in which he discussed the failure in the United States to reduce the suicide rate (which in recent years has been rising). Cas Soper has argued that there is no empirical reason to believe that predictors of suicide exist, there is no theoretical foundation for believing that risk factors exist, and there is evidence that suicide may be predictably unpredictable!David Lester reviews and discusses these views in The End of Suicidology: Can We Ever Understand Suicide? He reviews some recent efforts to stimulate the field of suicidology, and finds these attempts lacking. In the major section of the book, Lester presents some recent provocative ideas on suicide that have not hitherto received much attention, such as Brian Mishara's two component model of suicide with life and suicide tendencies, and David Lester and Steven Stack's proposal that suicide may be viewed as a drama staged by the prospective suicide. Might these provocative ideas and others stimulate the field?

Drawing on diverse theoretical and textual sources, The Gender of Suicide presents a critical study of the ways in which contemporary society understands suicide, exploring suicide across a range of key expert bodies of knowledge. With attention to Durkheim's founding study of suicide, as well as discourses within sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, this book demonstrates that suicide cannot be understood without understanding how gender shapes it, and without giving explicit attention to the manner in which prevailing claims privilege some interpretations and experiences of suicide above others. Revealing the masculine and masculinist terms in which our current knowledge of suicide is constructed, The Gender of Suicide, explores the relationship between our grasp of suicide and problematic ideas connected to the body, agency, violence, race and sexuality. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and social theorists, as well as scholars of cultural studies, philosophy, law and psychology.