Worldwide, at least 1 million people die by suicide each year and many millions more attempt suicide. However, suicide has been increasingly recognised as a preventable problem in many cases. Because of this, and the rising rates of suicide in young people, many countries have established national suicide prevention strategies. These include the United Kingdom, the USA, Scandinavian countries, other countries in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. There is also increasing emphasis on the treatment of suicidal people and those who have made suicide attempts. In order to be effective it is imperative that strategies for treatment and prevention are based on sound scientific evidence.
In this book leading figures from psychiatry, psychology, epidemiology, public health, and social medicine bring together the research evidence concerning the key elements in suicide prevention and treatment of suicidal behaviour and translate it into implications for practical action. This includes social and public health policy as well as clinical practice. The book draws together the evidence relevant to treatment and prevention, and uses this in order to highlight the most effective approaches. The range of initiatives covered is wide, reflecting the complex nature of suicide and hence the need for a range of approaches. This book will be an essential source for anyone concerned with the design and implementation of effective suicide prevention strategies, including clinicians working with individual patients, strategic policy makers, and researchers.

Worldwide, at least 1 million people die by suicide each year and many millions more attempt suicide. However, suicide has been increasingly recognised as a preventable problem in many cases. Because of this, and the rising rates of suicide in young people, many countries have established national suicide prevention strategies. These include the United Kingdom, the USA, Scandinavian countries, other countries in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. There is also increasing emphasis on the treatment of suicidal people and those who have made suicide attempts. In order to be effective it is imperative that strategies for treatment and prevention are based on sound scientific evidence. In this book leading figures from psychiatry, psychology, epidemiology, public health, and social medicine bring together the research evidence concerning the key elements in suicide prevention and treatment of suicidal behaviour and translate it into implications for practical action. This includes social and public health policy as well as clinical practice. The book draws together the evidence relevant to treatment and prevention, and uses this in order to highlight the most effective approaches. The range of initiatives covered is wide, reflecting the complex nature of suicide and hence the need for a range of approaches. This book will be an essential source for anyone concerned with the design and implementation of effective suicide prevention strategies, including clinicians working with individual patients, strategic policy makers, and researchers.

Although today in France church attendance is minimal, when death occurs many families still cling to religious rites. In exploring this common reaction to one of the most painful aspects of existence, Thomas Kselman turns to nineteenth-century French beliefs about death and the afterlife not only to show how deeply rooted the cult of the dead is in one Western society, but how death and the behavior of mourners have been politicized in the modern world. Drawing on sermons preached in rural and urban parishes, folktales, and accounts of seances, the author vividly re-creates the social and cultural context in which most French people responded to death and dealt with anxieties about the self and its survival. Inspired mainly by Catholicism, beliefs about death provided a social basis for moral order throughout the nineteenth century and were vulnerable to manipulation by public officials and clergy. Kselman shows, however, that by mid-century the increase in urbanization, capitalism, family privacy, and expressed religious differences generated diverse attitudes toward death, causing funerals to evolve from Catholic neighborhood rituals into personalized symbolic events for Catholics and dissenters alike--the civil burial of Victor Hugo being perhaps the greatest symbol of rebellion. Kselman's discussion of the growth of commercial funerals and innovations in cemetery administration illuminates a new struggle for control over funeral arrangements, this time involving businessmen, politicians, families, and clergy. This struggle in turn demonstrates the importance of these events for defining social identity. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Sunday Times Book of The Year A Mail on Sunday Book of The Year An Independent Book of The Year A The Times Book of The Year During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.

Emile Durkheim's On Suicide (1897) was a groundbreaking book in the field of sociology. Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a matter of purely individual despair but Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed that if anything can explain how individuals relate to society, then it is suicide: Why does it happen? What goes wrong? Why do certain social, religious or racial groups have higher incidences of suicide than others? As Durkheim explored these questions he became convinced that abnormally high or low levels of social integration lead to an increased likelihood of suicide. On Suicide was the result of his extensive research. Divided into three parts - individual reasons for suicide, social forms of suicide and the relation of suicide to society as a whole - Durkheim's revelations have fascinated, challenged and informed readers for over a century.

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Loss and Bereavement: Managing Change "explores situations and topics which can affect any one of us at any time. This a practical guide to help provide support for those experiencing bereavement, loss, transition and change. It provides a framework for understanding specific conflicts and their effects on health. This book encourages the use of range of skills while bringing a critical yet reflective dimension to this caring work. The text considers the work, school, family and social environments. Themes and issues of experiencing loss are considered including bullying, unemployment, violence, sexual crime and anger, the death of a child, mass disaster, and suicide. The final section considers coping mechanisms, such as assertiveness, grieving and posttraumatic stress syndrome.

Key features:
Details practical applications within a theoretical framework
Encourages a range of skill with a reflective dimension
Includes contributes from a range of viewpoints

This book is written for students who are developing their skill for supporting those who are experiencing grief or transition. It is essential reading for students and practitioners in nursing, teaching, medicine, therapies, the police, the ambulance and the first aid organizations, as well as the clergy and voluntary agencies. Course leaders and lecturers will also find a wealth of information to simulate discussion groups.

A Sunday Times Bestseller March 2022 (Ireland) Soon, the lockdown would start. People would die alone, without any proper ceremony. Charlotte's death would be washed away, the first drop in a downpour. Nobody knew it then but hers would be the last good funeral of the year. It was February 2020, when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and acclaimed novelist in a new, colder light. He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. He saw he was mourning his former self, not Charlotte. The search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. He remembers his brother Simon, a suicide at thirty; the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, wars that are hard to explain and never really stopped; his habit of shedding baggage, an excuse for hurrying past and not dwelling on things. Moving, funny, and searingly honest, The Last Good Funeral of the Year takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present: 'Could any true story end any other way?'

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives. In certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so. By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. Despite the terror we may feel when contemplating our deaths, then, the prospect of humanity's imminent extinction would pose a far greater threat to our ability to lead value-laden lives: lives structured by wholehearted engagement in valued activities and pursuits. This conclusion complicates widespread assumptions about human egoism and individualism. And it has striking implications for the way we think about climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other urgent threats to humanity's survival. Scheffler adds that, although we are not unreasonable to fear death, personal immortality, like the imminent extinction of humanity, would also undermine our confidence in the values we hold dear. His arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and that others should live. Scheffler's position is discussed with insight and imagination by four distinguished commentators - Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf - and Scheffler adds a final reply. "This is some of the most interesting and best-written philosophy I have read in a long time. Scheffler's book is utterly original in its fundamental conception, brilliant in its analysis and argument, and concise and at times beautiful in its formulation." Stephen Darwall, Yale University "[Scheffler's] discussion of the issues with which he has concerned himself is fresh and original. Moreover, so far as I am aware, those issues are themselves pretty much original with him. He seems really to have raised, within a rigorously philosophical context, some new questions. At least, so far as I know, no one before has attempted to deal with those questions so systematically. So it appears that he has effectively opened up a new and promising field of philosophical inquiry. Not bad going, in a discipline to which many of the very best minds have already devoted themselves for close to three thousand years." -Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University, from 'How the Afterlife Matters' (in this volume)" "A truly wonderful and very important book." - Derek Parfit, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford

The author sheds new light on aspects of the beliefs, attitudes, and rituals surrounding death in ancient Greece from the Minoan and Mycenean period to the end of the classical age. She draws on different types of evidence - from literary texts to burial customs, inscriptions, and images in art - to explore the fragmentary and problematic evidence for the reconstruction of attitudes towards, and the beliefs and practices pertaining to death and the afterlife. The book is also a sophisticated critique of the methodologies appropriate for interpreting the evidence for ancient beliefs. Insights from athropology and other disciplines help to inform the reconstruction of these beliefs and to minimize the intrustion of culturally determined assumptions which reflect modern thinking rather than ancient realities.

Dementia is a particularly cruel and teasing disease for which there is no known cure. No vaccine... and no escape, once it takes a hold. My book is a personal, yet hopefully objective, and sociological, reflection on all aspects of caring for my much-loved Mum throughout the steadily worsening stages of her final (5) years of life... until the Dementia finally reeled in its 'prey.' If it makes a positive difference to just one sufferer, it will not have been written in vain.

The state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This remarkable and disturbing history of capital punishment in Germany deals with the politics of the death penalty and the experience and cultural significance of executions. Richards Evans casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishment, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

A victim of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989, Anthony Bland lay in hospital in a coma being fed liquid food by a pump, via a tube passing through his nose and into his stomach. On 4 February 1993 Britain's highest court ruled that doctors attending him could lawfully act to end his life. Our traditional ways of thinking about life and death are collapsing. In a world of respirators and embryos stored for years in liquid nitrogen, we can no longer take the sanctity of human life as the cornerstone of our ethical outlook. In this controversial book Peter Singer argues that we cannot deal with the crucial issues of death, abortion, euthanasia and the rights of nonhuman animals unless we sweep away the old ethic and build something new in its place. Singer outlines a new set of commandments, based on compassion and commonsense, for the decisions everyone must make about life and death.

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the U.S. Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions that emerged within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials to negotiate the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death and used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.

Political, economic, social, cultural and technological changes have led to profound transformations in the ways that death and loss are perceived and managed in contemporary society. Over the last few decades, the long term shift to chronic illness as a major causal factor has significantly increased the time scale of dying. Most people die in institutions and 'care' is typically medical. Many communities and ordinary citizens now relinquish control and involvement to experts in the last stages of life.
At global and local levels, however, new arrangements are emerging to govern the changing face of death, and a reorientation model is being developed to counter claims of the 'creeping medicalisation' of death and dying. With an international authorship and scope, this book illustrates the interlinking nature of society, death and loss, and it gives examples of governance that promotes the empowerment, participation and the increasing need for the involvement of ordinary people and communities in differing social and cultural contexts.
Chapters come from collaborations of academics and practitioners in end of life care - from sociologists, anthropologists or the arts but also from nursing, social work, or medicine. The result is a reflective, academic and practical discussion of the outline of the problem we face in the contemporary governance of death, and an exploration of the critical, theoretical and practice-based ways forward for us all.

This volume of essays adopts a multi-faceted approach to questions surrounding dying and death. It features contributions from those working within the areas of palliative care, healthcare chaplaincy, philosophy, and theology. Among the topics covered are: the transformative power of palliative care; spiritual care at the end of life; a philosophical perspective on dying, death, and dignity; prudential judgment in end-of-life decision making; perinatal death; compassionate accompaniment of the bereaved; honoring the sacred story of the dying; reflecting on the Order of Christian Funerals; scriptural perspectives on mortality; the significance of music in the funeral liturgy; how the afterlife has been imagined within the Christian tradition; and the 'liturgy' of the Irish Wake. With questions for further discussion and reflection at the end of each chapter, all who wish to think more deeply about issues surrounding dying, death, and the care of the terminally ill, will find this collection timely and thought-provoking.