Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
by Kay Redfield Jamison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kay Redfield JamisonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10-05
ISBN: 0375401458
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
Book Review: An excellent study of a vitally important subject
Summary: 5 Stars
This book isn't an easy read: some chapters are heavy on statistics, while her stories of people who committed suicide (ranging from the explorer Meriwether Lewis to some equally dashing contemporaries) are often painful to read. Still, it's a vitally important book for two reasons. In spite of the immense advances made in the mental health field in recent decades, the subject of suicide, and the depressive illnesses that precede it, is still surrounded by misinformation and veiled in shame. Jamison's courageous discussion of her own struggles with depression, and the information she assembles in this book, are helping to dispel some of the fog. In addition, as she points out, depressive illnesses are a major public health problem (especially in the young) and are often misdiagnosed and undertreated; removing the stigma and raising people's awareness of the prevalence of these illnesses are major steps towards solving the problem. As someone who went through several deeply depressed, suicidal phases in my teens, I know that the hardest part is the feeling of isolation: I believed that I was the only person who felt this way, so it must stem from something wrong with ME; but when I told the adults around me that I was depressed, they'd laugh and say I had no reason for it and was just being melodramatic, and that made me feel even more depressed. (The only reason I'm alive today is that, at my lowest times, I had no access to a sure-fire method of doing myself in.) If I'd known at the time that my problem was solvable and not at all unique, my teen years would have been considerably less agonized. My only quibble with the book is that she seems to argue that suicidal depression ALWAYS and ONLY results from physical causes, whereas I know of several cases (my own included) in which an individual's inborn tendency towards depressive thinking was aggravated into full-blown depression by his/her circumstances. Again, depression isn't an on/off switch -- there are degrees of depression, some amenable to a "talking cure" while others require medication -- and I feel she focuses too intensely on the latter, although, from her statistics, that seems to be the kind that often leads to suicide. But these are minor quibbles; in general, the book is convincing and rather scary, and I feel that everyone in the helping professions (from high school teachers to psychiatrists) should read it.
Summary of Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
From the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind: the first major book in a quarter century on suicide, with a particular focus on its terrible pull on the young. Night Falls Fast is both compelling and timely: in the United States and across the world there has been a frightening surge in suicides committed by children, adolescents and young adults. It is the third major cause of death in 19- to 24-year-olds, and the second in college students. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, an internationally recognized authority on depressive illnesses and their treatment, knows this subject firsthand. At the age of 28, after years of struggling with manic-depression, she attempted to kill herself. Her survival marked the beginning of a life's work to investigate both mental illness and self-inflicted death.Weaving together a psychological and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays about individual suicides, Dr. Jamison in this book brings not only her compassion and literary skill, but all of her knowledge, research and clinical experience to bear on this devastating problem. In tracing the network of reasons that underlie suicide, Dr. Jamison gives us astonishing examples of the methods and places people have chosen to kill themselves, and a startling look at their journals, drawings and farewell notes. She also brings us vivid insight into the most recent findings from hospitals and laboratories across the world; the critical biological and psychological factors that interact to cause suicide; the new strategies being evolved to combat them; and the powerful, but insufficiently used treatments from modern medicine.
Night Falls Fast dispels the silence and shame that too often surround suicide; it helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to better recognize the person at risk, and to comprehend the profound and disturbing loss created in those left behind.
"Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense, and unpalliated," writes Kay Redfield Jamison. "There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death not uncommonly is violent and grisly." Jamison has studied manic-depressive illness and suicide both professionally--and personally. She first planned her own suicide at 17; she attempted to carry it out at 28. Now professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she explores the complex psychology of suicide, especially in people younger than 40: why it occurs, why it is one of our most significant health problems, and how it can be prevented. Jamison discusses manic-depression, suicide in different cultures and eras, suicide notes (they "promise more than they deliver"), methods, preventive treatments, and the devastating effects on loved ones. She explores what type of person commits suicide, and why, and when. She illustrates her points with detailed anecdotes about people who have attempted or committed suicide, some famous, some ordinary, many of them young. Not easy reading, either in subject or style, but you'll understand suicide better and be jolted by the intensity of depression that drives young people to it. --Joan Price
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