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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.

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Dr. Jack Kervorkian as portrayed by Al Pacino. Brilliant. Will I watch it on HBO? Probably.

There’s a superb review on the Los Angeles Times.

In the HBO film “You Don’t Know Jack,” there is something both familiar and unsettling in the man’s visage when it first comes into view. It’s hard to place precisely, but after taking in the obstinate rhetoric, the throwback glasses and the wan smile, we think we know this guy. Oh yeah, Dr. Death, the man with the mortally friendly bedside manner.

Or maybe not. The makers of the film, a biopic about Jack Kevorkian, the physician who became notorious for assisting over 130 suicides, would argue that even though many know of him, they don’t really understand him.

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Warning! The discussion is on the creepy side. Below is a comment from a reader.

There is good evidence that Toxoplasma gondii — the parasite often found in cat feces that poses a risk to human fetuses — spreads by affecting the behavior of its rodent hosts. Infected rodents show decreased fear-responses to cats, which is thought to increase the likelihood that the cats will then eat the rodents, allowing the protozoa to complete the next phase of their reproductive cycle in a feline host.

Your reader wrote, “Can you image something like that in humans?  Scary.”  There is a growing body of evidence, which is somewhat controversial, that toxoplasmosis may induce behavioral alterations in infected humans as well.

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“Young people see this as a way to give meaning to what seem like meaningless lives,” said Sudhir Kakar, a prominent psychoanalyst and novelist who has written extensively about mental health in India. “It is a way to become a hero, to take a stand.”

Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress, Mr. Kakar said.

But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed, Mr. Kakar said. And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion.

In modern, democratic India, however, such drastic measures seem like a bizarre and troubling throwback that has shattered many families.

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Very sad. There’s the mental illness part, sure. But after reading his letter, you can sense the seriousness of his views.

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Although their stories are all different, the survivors have one striking thing in common: the way they talk about suicide. Rather than saying someone “committed suicide,” they will say that a person “died of” or “lost to” suicide.

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