Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison
I bought this book by looking up "Best Books on Suicide" on Amazon. I've read Jamison's other, famous, book on bipolar disorder, An Unquiet Mind, which was a pleasure of silky, elegant, apt writing - and so was this.
I bought this a week or so after Paul committed suicide. I can't say why I wanted to read about suicide, or rather, why I felt as if it would comfort me, but it has. Maybe because self-murder seems inexplicable - I wanted to know why.
Normally, I have trouble finishing non-fiction books, but again, Jamison is a great writer and Night Falls Fast is written with compassion and rigor. Despite the fact that I have suicidal clients sometimes, I have only occasionally had to send them to the hospital - probably three times in seventeen years - and I had never bothered to know more about suicide than the therapist's normal protocol.
Things I didn't know that I know now: suicide is almost exclusively the product of mental illness, not circumstances, and the three vastly preponderant illnesses at the root of suicide are bipolar disorder, depression and the personality disorders; suicide, despite often being preceded by months or years of suicidal thoughts, is very frequently impulsive, and the mentally ill most likely to commit suicide are those who also have a rash, violent or impulsive temperament and access to certain means; the drug lithium is protective against suicide to a great degree, even apart from how effective it is in treating individual mood dysregulation. That is to say, for unknown reasons, even if the lithium does not regulate your bipolar moods or your depression, it can protect you from suicide. Suicide does, indeed, occur in clusters, especially among the young - Plano, Texas; Leominster, Massachusetts; Mankato, Minnesota; Fairfax County, Virginia. That's us, Fairfax County. Different countries have characteristic means of suicide and when people immigrate, they bring these along until they have assimilated; they then adopt the means of the new land. For instance, more men than women complete a suicide except in China, where rural women have access to deadly pesticides and little access to emergency health care, but in the U.S., it's guns, of course, and men.
I understood this before but I understand it better now, after the struggles of the winter and my continuing difficulty in feeling okay all the time: people don't kill themselves from cowardice or rage or a wish to make other people sorry. They do it because they just can't stand how they feel anymore and they can't imagine it will ever change.
I bought this a week or so after Paul committed suicide. I can't say why I wanted to read about suicide, or rather, why I felt as if it would comfort me, but it has. Maybe because self-murder seems inexplicable - I wanted to know why.
Normally, I have trouble finishing non-fiction books, but again, Jamison is a great writer and Night Falls Fast is written with compassion and rigor. Despite the fact that I have suicidal clients sometimes, I have only occasionally had to send them to the hospital - probably three times in seventeen years - and I had never bothered to know more about suicide than the therapist's normal protocol.
Things I didn't know that I know now: suicide is almost exclusively the product of mental illness, not circumstances, and the three vastly preponderant illnesses at the root of suicide are bipolar disorder, depression and the personality disorders; suicide, despite often being preceded by months or years of suicidal thoughts, is very frequently impulsive, and the mentally ill most likely to commit suicide are those who also have a rash, violent or impulsive temperament and access to certain means; the drug lithium is protective against suicide to a great degree, even apart from how effective it is in treating individual mood dysregulation. That is to say, for unknown reasons, even if the lithium does not regulate your bipolar moods or your depression, it can protect you from suicide. Suicide does, indeed, occur in clusters, especially among the young - Plano, Texas; Leominster, Massachusetts; Mankato, Minnesota; Fairfax County, Virginia. That's us, Fairfax County. Different countries have characteristic means of suicide and when people immigrate, they bring these along until they have assimilated; they then adopt the means of the new land. For instance, more men than women complete a suicide except in China, where rural women have access to deadly pesticides and little access to emergency health care, but in the U.S., it's guns, of course, and men.
I understood this before but I understand it better now, after the struggles of the winter and my continuing difficulty in feeling okay all the time: people don't kill themselves from cowardice or rage or a wish to make other people sorry. They do it because they just can't stand how they feel anymore and they can't imagine it will ever change.