From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a review on a new about the myths relating to suicide by Thomas Joiner:
As its title announces, Myths About Suicide also seeks to debunk the myriad ways that suicide is stigmatized by ignorance, disgust, contempt, and callousness.
Is suicide cowardly, as commonly held? No, says Joiner, because overriding the survival instinct requires confronting the fearsome and painful prospect of death. Is it a moral defect? No, because it occurs in a state far removed from measured consideration and balance. Is it a young person’s disorder? No: In the United States, for example, the majority of suicides are men over 50, he says.
“We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, nor rash; that it is not caused by breast augmentation, medicines, ‘slow’ methods like smoking or anorexia, or as some psychoanalysts thought, things like masturbation,” Joiner writes. Indeed, he argues that most mental-health professionals are barely less benighted than the general public about suicide, a function of their own fear, ignorance, and a failure of training, amounting to what he sees as a failure in their medical duty to care.
But his own analysis sometimes glosses over painful subjects. While he is careful to acknowledge that characterizing suicide as selfish stems from “trying to reason about the suicidal mind from a nonsuicidal place,” he devotes little attention to a related element: suicide’s intense focus on the self. Is it fatally distorted, or appropriate to the intractable agony of a suicidal person’s life? For some critics, Joiner sometimes sees issues so intently through the lens of his theory that he doesn’t deal with such major concerns.