Customer Reviews

Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Much has been published in the suicidology field and with great value but the Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology comes to fill a gap in comprehensivness.

Encyclopedic, this book is surely an excellent resource for those who are engaged in suicide prevention and also for all health professionals who may encounter in this book the answers to some of the questions raised when confronted with a suicidal patient.

The merits goes to the three main authors, Dr. Marris, Berman and Silverman but also to their contributing authors for this excellent work.

As Director and Project manager of the Suicide & Parasuicide Web Site - The Suicidology web, we have awarded this book the title of "Book of the year 2000".

I don't see anything less than five stars for this textbook. Theory, methods, history, sampling, clarity of presentation all rank high with me, generally.

I clean after death, and over half of these deaths result from suicide, especially since the recent economic collapse. When I clean I often ask myself, "Why?". I've promised myself for years to begin researching suicide and this text helps answer a lot of questions as well as verify what I suspected, especially about alcoholism, drug abuse, and white males. I've never cleaned after a black woman's suicide. My introduction to academic suicide began with Durkheim some 35 years ago. Now I see a real need to continue with a genuine interest in suicide. If I can enlighten myself about suicide, then maybe I'll gain some idea about why our society continues to deny global warming, nuclear weapons, and the consequences of habitat destruction, to name a few of our denials.

On the downside I ran across a few sentences in need of rewriting, but a little extra effort helped to clarify the wordiness of these slight problems. By way of example at the bottom of page 75,we have two sentences packed with interesting information while demonstrating the effort required by a simple sentence followed by a terribly complex sentence:

In a real sense, then, much of suicide prevention amounts to gun control. As the British studies of coal gas and suicide have shown (Kreitman, 1976), most people do not simply switch methods of suicide if their preferred method is not readily available(i.e., when home coal gas was detoxified in Great Britain, the suicide rate went down and tended to stay down).

There are 49 words in the second sentence. My style reader gives it a "BAD" and "unreadable sentence." It does not belong in this textbook. I thought teacher's aids were available for finding problems like this. Aids would benefit tremendously with a task to help edit for readability. Some sort of academic credit should suffice.

It seems to me that a little work would help those in need of an easier text. Perhaps the last sentence should serve as the first: Suicide rates drop with availability of preferred methods. When Britain detoxified its lethal coal gas, the suicide rate went down and tended to stay down.

For the concerned and interested reader, sentence structure does not stop one from reading and thinking. Rewriting difficult sentences serves those with weak reading skills. This is an important text and I would run it through a readability scanner.
I still believe that it earned five stars.

Eddie Evans
[...]

I am researching a book on death in Lake Superior, and used this book to help frame a chapter on suicide. There is a ton of excellent information in here, though I didn't find some specifics I was looking for. It looks truly comprehensive from the psychology perspective. I was looking for more data on changes in suicide methods over time, and only found glancing references to those. The bibliography is extensive, however, and gave me good articles to follow up with.

Great book for mental health professionals. Thorough review of existing literature and statistics on the subject, illustrated with case reports. Some numbers are outdated, such as prevalence of suicides in certain psychiatric disorders. The book expands your understanding of what you are dealing with as a psychiatrist and what you are doing with and to your patient. Highly recommended.

Without doubt this is a must-keep reference work for any lay person or professional wishing to have readily available a host of extensively researched topics in the general field of suicidology.

Written with an academic standard refreshing and uncommon, this work - drawing upon extensive research and a team of authors - addresses nearly every topic imaginable including the following: historical changes in attitudes towards suicide; differences in motives and methods based upon one's sex, age, social class, racial-nationality-culture; communication styles of the suicide [the noun for the perpetrator]; the role of depression when coupled with hopelessness; actions that are risk-taking, life-enhancing, life-damaging but questionable as to whether they show suicidal intent; assisted suicide; to name some of the several topics so amply covered.

Psychological instruments for evaluating quality of life, suicidal ideation and other relevant topics are offered and interesting but should NOT be employed unless one has ample and competent training.

The only criticism of note is that suicide is dealt with exclusively as a malady, failing to consider (1) rational assessment and logical justification scenarios or (2)culturally supported suicide where such acts are placed in the pantheon of honorable deeds.

Aside from this minor detraction, the work merits serious study for anyone interested in this still taboo subject.