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Writing against the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Whitehead turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. By turns provocative and deeply affecting, this book brings suicide into conversation with the critical medical humanities, extending beyond individual pathology and the medical institution to think about subjective and social perspectives, and to open up the various sites, scenes and interactions with which suicide is associated.Suicide is related forward from the point of death, rather than taking a retrospective view. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection based on her own experience of her sister's suicide, Whitehead examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship.

Viele Fragen zur Selbsttötung und zum gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit Selbsttötung werden aktuell in der Öffentlichkeit und auf verschiedenen Forschungsfeldern diskutiert. Eine umfassende Behandlung des Themas mit Blick auf das Alte Testament und die Kulturen des Alten Orients, einschließlich des Alten Ägypten, stand bislang jedoch aus. Mit dem vorliegenden Band schließt Jan Dietrich diese Forschungslücke. Er grenzt Suizid und Suizidgedanken vom allgemeinen Sterbens- und Todeswunsch ab und wählt einen kulturgeschichtlichen und soziologischen Zugriff auf die Quellen. Die Selbsttötung wird dabei aus der Perspektive des Suizidanten und aus der Perspektive der Kulturen des Altertums verständlich gemacht und es wird gezeigt, dass sie fernab von dem Stigma Krankheit oder Sünde ihren Platz in der Wiege unserer Kultur hatte. Entsprechend wird die Selbsttötung als'Sinngeschichte', als ein mit Sinn besetzter Versuch zur Lösung eines lebensrelevanten Problems begriffen. Der Autor unterscheidet zwischen eskapistischen Formen des Suizids in unterschiedlichen Kontexten sowie zwischen aggressiven und oblativen Formen und macht die Selbsttötung besonders vor dem Hintergrund vorherrschender Ehr- und Schamvorstellungen verständlich.

What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or ‘voluntary death'have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time?In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim – namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives.This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.

This study examines the presentation of suicide within the genre of the eighteenth-century novel. Referencing several key writers of the period, McGuire demonstrates that their work inscribes a nationalist imperative to frame suicide as self-sacrifice.

Suizidgeschichten einzuleiten ist wahrscheinlich sinnlos. Nur in medias res, unter dem vollen Gewicht der Tat und vielleicht im Nachhinein, kann man sie am besten verstehen. Dieser Essay enthält biographische Angaben zu 423 Schriftstellern und Schriftstellerinnen, die sich im Zeitraum von 1609 (John Suckling) bis 2008 (mit den neuesten Suizidfällen von Thomas M. Disch, Hugo Claus, David Foster, Miroslaw Nahacz) umbrachten. Das Buch beabsichtigt keinesfalls eine moralische Wertung, keinen Vorwurf an die Lebensunfähigen, auch keine Klassifizierung der meisten Betroffenen als Verrückte, als manisch-depressive Menschen, wie sie allzu oft oberflächlich genannt werden. Die Autorin untersucht vielmehr Umstände und Gründe dieser gemeinsamen Ausnahmesituation am Beispiel von Suizidpaaren, Familien mit mehreren Selbstmördern, Ort, Datum, Ereignissen, Todesinstrument, Gruppen nach Alter, Geschlecht, Nationalität, Suizid aus politischen Gründen und Foltererinnerungen, aus unglücklicher Liebe, Misserfolg, Unvermögen der Psychiatrie, schwerer Krankheit (Recht auf Sterbehilfe, wie Arthur Koestler beanspruchte) usw. Die Verfasserin, selbst Dichterin, will gesellschaftliche Missstände anklagen – Interesse an dem letzten Werk vor dem Suizid und Nähe zu den Erlebnissen der Autoren erzeugen, besonders zu den 77 Autorinnen. Höhepunkt der Nähe ist ihr fiktionaler Schlussdialog.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with more than one million fatalities each year. During the post-war period, the rate of completed suicides has risen dramatically, especially among young men and Aboriginal peoples living in the Western world. While this has naturally led to growing concern amongst health care practitioners and policy experts, relatively little is known about the history of attempted and completed suicide. Histories of Suicide is the first book to examine the history of suicide in diverse national contexts, including Japan, Scotland, Australia, Soviet Russia, Peru, United States, France, South Africa, and Canada, to reveal the different social, political, economic, and cultural factors that inform our understanding of suicide. This interdisciplinary collection of essays assembles historians, health economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, who examine the history of suicide from a variety of approaches to provide crucial insight into how suicide differs across nations, cultures, and time periods. Focusing on developments from the eighteenth century to the present, the contributors examine vitally important topics such as the medicalization of suicide, representations of mental illness, psychiatric disputes, and the frequency of suicide amongst soldiers. An illuminating volume of studies, Histories of Suicide is a fascinating examination of the phenomenon of self-destruction throughout different historical periods and nations.

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condemnation of suicide, in a quest which leads along the most unexpected byways of medieval theology, law, mythology, and folklore –and, indeed, in some instances beyond them. At an epoch when there might be plenty of ostensible reasons for not wanting to live, the ways used to block the suicidal escape route give a unique perspective on medieval religion.

Vol. 1 has errata slip inserted.