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This article focuses on the book "Clues to Suicide," edited by E.S. Shneidman and N.L. Farberow. This book is a collection of papers presenting various approaches relating to the problem of suicide.

This article examines the consequences of urban migration for suicide by analyzing the case histories of persons who committed suicide in New Orleans. The major independent variables under consideration are migration, sex, and race. Migration confronts the individual with a new milieu that may contrast sharply with the way of life in a small town. The South provides an exceptionally pointed region for such investigation because there the urban-rural contrast is generally greater than in the older urbanized regions of the country. The urban situation is different in all of the systems that comprise human social life. In the social realm, the in-migrant lacks the family and friends of his town of orientation. The urban and rural situations are, of course, not totally different even in the South, but they are dissimilar enough to be reflected by higher deviance rates reported in the migration studies reviewed. Moving to the factor of migration, several studies demonstrate the sometimes troubling impact of city ward movement. These studies reveal that deviance is associated with non-nativity, and with the more general factor of horizontal mobility.

The article discusses scale for assessing suicide risk of attempted suicides. The identification of high suicide potential persons presents a difficult practical problem to the clinician who has responsibility for their diagnosis and management and to other professional workers involved in helping such persons get to appropriate community resources. In 1964, the number of suicides in the United States was reported to be 20,588. Since the number of persons attempting suicide each year has been found to be about eight times the number of suicides, and this may be an underestimate ion, it would be impractical to hospitalize even those who attempt suicide, let alone those who threaten or otherwise give signs of suicidal intent, without overtaxing present treatment resources.

The article examines the fantasy aggression of individuals choosing different methods for suicide, since it appeared likely that the modes of expressing aggression would be relevant to the choice of an active or passive method for obtaining particular goals. Methods of suicide were classified into active (cutting, jumping, hanging and shooting) and passive (use of gas, poison or drugs, and drowning). Choice of method of 28 psychotics who made lethal attempts was available and was used to compare the methods chosen by psychotics and non-psychotics. No significant differences were found.