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Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide Paperback – October 10, 2000
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The first major book in a quarter century on suicide—and its terrible pull on the young in particular—Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.
From the author of the best-selling memoir, An Unquiet Mind—and an internationally acknowledged authority on depression—Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind.
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 10, 2000
- Dimensions5.14 x 0.99 x 7.94 inches
- ISBN-100375701478
- ISBN-13978-0375701474
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Jamison brings us face to face with the suicidal mind in a manner so intense and penetrating that, paradoxically, the immersion in despair she offers is a source of great pleasure."—The Washington Post Book World
"This powerful book will change people's lives—and, doubtless, save a few."—Newsday
"A profound and impassioned book—it will stand as the authoritative study of suicide for many years."—William Styron, author of Darkness Visible
"[Jamison] writes not only in fierce opposition to suicide, but also in passionate vindication of life."—The New York Times Book Review
From the Inside Flap
An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.
From the Back Cover
An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Summer evenings at the Bistro Gardens in Beverly Hills tended toward the long and languorous. My friend Jack Ryan and I went there often when I lived in Los Angeles, and I invariably ordered the Dungeness crab and a scotch on the rocks. Not so invariably, but from time to time, Jack would use the occasion to suggest we get married. It was an idea with such patent potential for catastrophe that neither of us had much of an inclination to take the recurring proposal with too much gravity. But our friendship we took seriously.
This particular evening, having hooked and tugged out the last bits of crab, I found myself edgily knocking the ice cubes around in my whisky glass. The conversation was making me restless and uneasy. We were talking about suicide and making a blood oath: if either of us again became deeply suicidal, we agreed, we would meet at Jack's home on Cape Cod. Once there, the nonsuicidal one of us would have a week to persuade the other not to commit suicide; a week to present all the reasons we could come up with for why the other should go back on lithium, assuming that having stopped it was the most likely reason for the danger of suicide (we both had manic-depressive illness and, despite the better and often expressed judgment of others, had a tendency to stop taking our lithium); a week to cajole the other into a hospital; to invoke conscience; to impress upon the other the pain and damage to our families that suicide would inevitably bring.
We would, we said, during this hostage week, walk along the beach and remind the other of all of the times we had felt at the end of hope and, somehow, had come back. Who, if not someone who had actually been there, could better bring the other back from the edge? We both, in our own ways and in our own intimate dealings with it, knew suicide well. We thought we knew how we could keep it from being the cause of death on our death certificates.
We decided that a week was long enough to argue for life. If it didn't work, at least we would have tried. And, because we had years of cumulative experience with lifestyles of snap impetuousness and knew how quick and final a suicidal impulse could be, we further agreed that neither of us would ever buy a gun. Nor, we swore, would we under any circumstances allow anyone else to keep a gun in a house in which we lived.
"Cheers," we said in synchrony, ice and glass clinking. We sealed our foray into the planned and rational world. Still, I had my doubts. I listened to the details, helped clarify a few, drank the rest of my scotch, and stared at the tiny white lights in the gardens around us. Who were we kidding? Never once, during any of my sustained bouts of suicidal depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. Not once. It wasn't in me. How could I seriously imagine that I would call Jack, make an airline reservation, get to an airport, rent a car, and find my way out to his house on the Cape? It seemed only slightly less absurd that Jack would go along with the plan, although he, at least, was rich and could get others to handle the practicalities. The more I thought about the arrangement, the more skeptical I became.
It is a tribute to the persuasiveness, reverberating energies and enthusiasms, and infinite capacity for self-deception of two manic temperaments that by the time the dessert soufflés arrived we were utterly convinced that our pact would hold. He would call me; I would call him; we would outmaneuver the black knight and force him from the board.
If it has ever been taken up as an option, however, the black knight has a tendency to remain in play. And so it did. Many years later -- Jack had long since married and I had moved to Washington -- I received a telephone call from California: Jack had put a gun to his head, said a member of his family, and "put a bullet through his brain."
No week in Cape Cod, no chance to dissuade. A man who had been inventive enough to earn a thousand patents for such wildly diverse creations as the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems used by the U.S. Department of Defense, toys played with by millions of children around the world, and devices used in virtually every household in America; a Yale graduate and lover of life; a successful businessman -- this remarkably imaginative man had not been inventive enough to find an alternative solution to a violent, self-inflicted death.
Although shaken by Jack's suicide, I was not surprised by it. Nor was I surprised that he had not called me. I, after all, had been dangerously suicidal myself on several occasions since our Bistro Gardens pact and certainly had not called him. Nor had I even thought of calling. Suicide is not beholden to an evening's promises, nor does it always hearken to plans drawn up in lucid moments and banked in good intentions.
I know this for an unfortunate fact. Suicide has been a professional interest of mine for more than twenty years, and a very personal one for considerably longer. I have a hard-earned respect for suicide's ability to undermine, overwhelm, outwit, devastate, and destroy. As a clinician, researcher, and teacher I have known or consulted on patients who hanged, shot, or asphyxiated themselves; jumped to their deaths from stairwells, buildings, or overpasses; died from poisons, fumes, prescription drugs; or slashed their wrists or cut their throats. Close friends, fellow students from graduate school, colleagues, and children of colleagues have done similar or the same. Most were young and suffered from severe illness; all left behind a wake of unimaginable pain and unresolvable guilt.
Like many who have manic-depressive illness, I have also known suicide in a more private, awful way, and I trace the loss of a fundamental innocence to the day that I first considered suicide as the only solution possible to an unendurable level of mental pain. Until that time I had taken for granted, and loved more than I knew, a temperamental lightness of mood and a fabulous expectation of life. I knew death only in the most abstract of senses; I never imagined it would be something to arrange or seek.
I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way. For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells; discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load my father's gun. It was not the kind of education one expected to receive in high school.
The rest of my life at the time -- sports, classes, writing, friends, planning for college -- fell fast into a black night. Everything seemed a ridiculous charade to endure; a hollow existence to fake
one's way through as best one could. But, gradually, layer by layer, the depression lifted, and by the time my senior prom and graduation came around, I had been well for months. Suicide had withdrawn to the back squares of the board and become, once again, unthinkable.
Chillingly, although the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably frightening.
Over the years, my manic-depressive illness became much worse, and the reality of dying young from suicide became a dangerous undertow in my dealings with life. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, after a damaging and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility, if not a probability, in my life.
Under the circumstances -- I was, during this, a young faculty member in a department of academic psychiatry -- it was not a very long walk from personal experience to clinical and scientific investigation. I studied everything I could about my disease and read all I could find about the psychological and biological determinants of suicide. As a tiger tamer learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the moods of death.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage (October 10, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375701478
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375701474
- Item Weight : 10.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 0.99 x 7.94 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #92,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #62 in Coping with Suicide Grief
- #245 in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
- #279 in Anxiety Disorders (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Kay Redfield Jamison (born June 22, 1946) is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She holds a post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Unknown, Copyright Holder is JHMI [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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What is intriguing about suicide is how it's peculiar to humans - for example, how it can be a product of the human ability to self-reflect and ruminate. From the evolutionary perspective, it is strange that this disposition towards ending one's own life (i.e. depression) has remained in the gene pool. Redfield talks about the possible altruistic notions of suicide - in the Eskimos, Norse, Samoan and Crow Indians, it is acceptable as an act of self-sacrifice among elderly and the sick. In Nomadic tribes, anyone slowing you down reduces your chance of survival. But if you move from the hereditary to the genetic - it turns out that the question of genes is a significantly difficult one. Are there specific genes for suicide, a result of genetically passed dispositions (including addiction, aggression and so forth), or disposition towards mental illnesses that cause suicide? Maybe, it's a more of a random product of DNA arrangement. As usual, the hereditary questions are relatively easier to answer than those regarding the genetic mechanisms that govern them.
That isn't the only problem with the science of suicide - the statistics and surveys are hard to capture information from, and analyze them properly. Suicide continues to be underreported, although there has been tremendous progress in decreasing this. When it comes to clinical drug trials, suicidal patients are almost always excluded so it's hard to make compelling studies between suicidal behavior and antidepressants.
The book talks a lot about mental illnesses such as depression, manic-depression and schizophrenia, but makes sure not to delve into them so its feels like a repetition of a course in abnormal psychology - it sticks to its own domain of suicide, regardless of the degree of overlap between psychopathology and suicide. It talks about many things that you can find in standard suicide text and manuals: risk factors, methods of suicide. This description is slight unfair...this book doesn't read like a manual, scientific and cultural commentary chapters are alternated with very intimate accounts: there are tragic mentions of suicide notes, but the book isn't about sympathy, there is an entire chapter on how effective suicide notes are effective in determining suicidal intentions, recreating the completer's psychological state of mind before suicide.
The book is a must read for anyone, probably because nearly anyone who is uninformed about suicide is bound to have views based on false notions or misinformation surround the topic: People are shocked at successful people committing suicide ("Why did they kill themselves if they had it good?" without knowing that manic-depression targets the successful and academically high achieving more than the normal population. It mainly strikes in college years, and for reasons such as this that college's need well managed mental health infrastructure almost as much as other facilities such as athletic buildings and libraries. After reading this book, you'll feel antsy about WHY there isn't more aggressive drive towards improving suicide awareness, especially due to its prevalent in school years.
The last chapter of the book is incredibly important as I feel that it had something that was missing from other books about suicide. Whereas most books place emphasis the individual, Jamison talks about societal views and especially recommending media and journalistic ethics - something important in our (unfortunately) hyper-reporting-dependent society: not presenting simplistic explanations for suicide, repetitive reporting, "how-to" descriptions of suicide, glorification of suicide and perhaps the most counter-intuitive idea - that we should NOT focus on completer's positive characteristics too much ("he/she had a bright future") because it may make suicide attractive to people at risk who aren't as well performing.
Books such as these are terribly important because they can act as tools to slowly chip away at the stigma associated with suicide, especially those in religious communities. In Abrahamic religions that take up most of the world's population, there are no burial rights for suicides. Lastly, I shouldn't forget to mention that for a lawmaker, her policy recommendations give an imperative insight into what a society should be doing to tackle a phenomenon like suicide.
I loved reading this book and didn't find it even boring in the slightest although I had nothing to benefit from it personally, professionally or academically. It's interesting simply due to its power to make someone into an informed citizen simply by capturing his or her curiosity. There isn't anything to complain about in this book - except that I hope that she discussed the philosophy of suicide more before considering there is endless debate on the bravery vs. cowardice and undesirability of this option. (Camus said "There is only one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide".)
A brilliant, personal, well-written and studied book!
My daughter, never in her 23 years, showed one single sign to me or any of her friends of depression. I found out after her death, that she had confided in one friend that she was depressed very soon before she died, but that person thought we knew and did not know she was suicidal. Other than that, her life was filled with success that came very easily to her. She was brilliant, sweet, loving, an artist, a writer, and succeeded at everything she set out to do. She never seemed depressed or stressed out. She was doing extremely well in medical school. I saw her the week before she died and she seemed totally normal, her sweet, happy, normal self. One week later I was called at work by the police that lived over 3 hours away where she lived and went to medical school that she was dead from suicide. Only in her suicide note did I find out that she had been depressed all her life and hid it from us to protect us from it. She said she would have took her life years ago but could not bear to do it due to the pain it would cause us, but to forgive her that she could no longer go on due to the weight of the sadness she has lived all her life. This seemingly happy child from the day she was born, sad?? I won't go in to the depths of my pain since and what it is now and will forever be. But I needed answers. This book provides answers in part, because it has in it the many instances of brilliant people taking their own lives.
I do want to let you know that this book is excellent. It is written by someone who suffers from bipolar disorder, has attempted suicide herself, but has continued on to lead a very productive life and is a psychologist. She has her own personal experience in this book as well as experiences of others. However, I would not suggest this book to anyone who has very recently lost someone to suicide. Your mind would not be able to grasp this book then. What you need then is something to help you through your pain as best you can. Though I still need this, I needed something to help me understand the mood disorders such as depression and bipolar. I don't know which one my daughter had, probably major depression. But I will never know because she never sought help.
Also, there is a lot of scientific information in this book such as the biology of a suicidal mind, history of depression in the past and how society dealt with it. This may be too much scientific information for some people it just depends on the person. For me, it helped knowing this.
The book is also filled with just so much that helped me and much of it is just too hard to put into words in this review.
I recommend this book highly for someone who wants to try to understand suicide (what we know so far anyway, we have much more to learn), but wait a bit after your loss.
No book you read will relieve the agony that one experiences after the loss of a loved one after suicide, especially if it's your child. But some books help you better understand things and that's about as much as any book can do with this horrible epidemic.
Top reviews from other countries
Trata el tema del suicidio de forma amplia analizándolo desde diferentes aspectos y pintos de vista. Este es un tema tabú, rodeado de misterio y de silencios. El libro entra en todo y permite desmitificar el tema y enfrentarlo en toda su dimensión. Sin duda solo para interesados en el tema, pero vale la pena para estos.









