A compelling and agonising story.

Durban-based journalist Glynis Horning and her husband Chris woke up one Sunday morning almost two years ago to the devastating discovery of their 25-year-old son Spencer dead in his bed. Horning’s story chronicles a parent’s worst nightmare. Establishing that his death was suicide, Horning embarks on a journey of anguished self-recrimination.

Should she not have seen the signs? Could she somehow have prevented it? As she struggles with Spencer’s decision to end his life, she has to learn to understand what the depths of depression entail. We feel Horning’s pain, and learn to understand and feel Spencer’s pain, at a visceral level.

Surrounded by loving family and friends, Horning pieces together the puzzle of Spencer’s death, writing with a brutal and heart-searing intensity of grief and loss, but also of the joys of celebrating her son’s life. This book will touch anyone who has experienced a mental health journey directly or indirectly, or a searing loss. Her wisdom and insight are extraordinary.

It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.

And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.

No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

A hair-raising account about the ins and outs of practising forensic pathology in Africa As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal's chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he's encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife. Blumenthal takes the reader behind the scenes at the mortuary, describing a typical autopsy and the instruments of the trade. He also shares a few trade secrets, like how to establish when a suicide is more likely to be a homicide. Even though they cannot speak, the dead have a lot to say - and Blumenthal is there to listen.

In recent years, the lens of the media has narrowed issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide to a drama involving two players: Dr. Kevorkian and the law. This has left suffering patients and their families unrecognized and isolated when facing the most painful life decision.

Here at last is a book that addresses the role of psychiatry in dealing with a major, controversial topic in American medicine today& mdash;treatment decisions at the end of life. "End-of-Life Decisions: A Psychosocial Perspective" acknowledges and explores the role psychiatrists can play as advisers to the terminally ill and their loved ones. It describes the wide range of emotional and psychiatric issues faced by the patient, family, and physician that affect choices patients make to limit treatment or seek physician assistance in dying.

A distinguished group of contributors, all of whom have extensive experience dealing with end-of-life issues in clinical practice, address topics that may not have been considered previously. From dealing with issues of terminal illnesses in children, to making difficult treatment decisions for patients with AIDS; from judging the competency of clinically depressed patients for making sound decisions, to understanding the influence of family dynamics, economic forces, and language differences on doctor-patient communication& mdash;the book uses specific case studies and data to explore the role of professionals in end-of-life decisions.

"End-of-Life Decisions" strikes a careful balance between the need for patient autonomy and the challenge to make well-formulated treatment decisions. This book will heighten modern medicine& rsquo;s and society& rsquo;s consciousnessconcerning the difficult challenges faced by patients and their families when making end-of-life decisions

A basic motivation for social and cultural life is the problem of death. By analysing the experiences of dying and bereaved people, as well as institutional responses to death, Clive Seale shows its importance for understanding the place of embodiment in social life. He draws on a comprehensive review of sociological, anthropological and historical studies, including his own research, to demonstrate the great variability that exists in human social constructions for managing mortality. Far from living in a 'death denying' society, dying and bereaved people in contemporary culture are often able to assert membership of an imagined community, through the narrative reconstruction of personal biography, drawing on a variety of cultural scripts emanating from medicine, psychology, the media and other sources. These insights are used to argue that the maintenance of the human social bond in the face of death is a continual resurrective practice, permeating everyday life.

Establishing a new set of international perspectives from around the world on and experiences of death, disposition and remembrance in urban environments, this book brings deathscapes - material, embodied and emotional places associated with dying and death - to life. It pushes the boundaries of established empirical and conceptual understandings of death in urban spaces through anthropological, geographical and ethnographic insights. Chapters reveal how urban deathscapes are experienced, used, managed and described in specific locales in varied settings; how their norms and values intersect and at times conflict with the norms of dominant and assumed practices; and how they are influenced by the dynamic practices, politics and demographics typical of urban spaces. Case studies from across Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America highlight the differences between deathscapes, but also show their clear commonality in being as much a part of the world of the living as they are of the dead. With a people- and space-centred approach, this book will be an interesting read for human geography, death studies and urban studies scholars, as well as social and cultural anthropologists and sociologists. Its international and interdisciplinary nature will also make this a beneficial book for planning and landscape architecture, religious studies and courses on death practices.

Even the most skilled therapist may underestimate suicide potential. Careful assessment and competent psychiatric intervention cannot always predict the suicidality of a particular person. "Adolescent Suicide" (GAP Report 140) presents techniques that allow psychiatrists and all those caring for the health and welfare of adolescents to respond to signals of distress with timely therapeutic intervention. It also suggests measures of anticipatory prevention.

"Adolescent Suicide" presents an overview of adolescent suicidal behavior. It explores risk factors, the identification and evaluation of the suicidal adolescent, and approaches to therapy. It offers both historical and cross-cultural perspectives, the relevance of suicide to adolescent development, mental health training needs regarding suicidality, and related issues such as public health policies and medicolegal concerns.

The risk of suicide presents a unique crisis in adolescent development. For this reason, all mental health professionals will find this report an indispensable tool in the treatment of adolescents at risk for suicide. Drawing from years of combined experience, this committee has applied its expertise on adolescent development to the sobering problem of suicide.