Word: farberow
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...exception. The notes that suicides leave behind suggest that they rarely appreciate the fact that they will not be around to enjoy the fruits of their action. In analyzing 721 suicide notes collected by the Los Angeles county coroner's office, Psychologists Edwin S. Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow were struck by the many instructions, admonitions and lists of things to do that seemed to epitomize "the illogicality of the entire suicidal deed-thinking simultaneously and contradictorily of being absent and giving orders as though one were going to be present to enforce them...
Still, many who kill themselves have an understandable desire for extinction-Shneidman and Farberow call them "surcease" suicides. Brilliant, hard-driving lames Forrestal, the first U.S. Defense Secretary, who threw himself from a 16th-story hospital window in May of 1949, was suffering from a mental breakdown and decided that life was unendurable with his mind impaired. Novelist Virginia Woolf also killed herself (in April 1941) because she thought she was going mad. Poet Hart Crane was seriously deranged when he killed himself in April 1932, as was Ernest Hemingway when he blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun...
Head of the new Washington organization is Psychologist Shneidman who joined with Fellow Psychologist Farberow eight years ago to found the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, recognized as the most thorough and modern operation of its kind. The volunteers on its staff, who have been trained by professionals, answer the agonized phone calls that flood in with sympathetic attention, assess the imminence of a suicidal act, and refer callers to institutions for help...
Most suicides, psychologists agree, really want to be rescued. The case of the man threatening to jump to death in public view may be extreme, but it is also typical. Says Farberow: "The man up there is saying, 'Look at me. See how bad I feel.' Sitting on the ledge of a building is a tremendous effort at communication." Of immediate importance in improving communication is the education of medical men to recognize the symptoms of potential suicides; two-thirds of those who attempt suicide have visited a physician. There are various warning signs, including talk; the notion...
...director of the S.P.C., and other professional staff members, they are enrolled as deputy L.A. coroners. They conduct psychological and psychiatric examinations in selected cases among the county's 8,000-a-year suicides, attempted suicides and suspected suicides.*Last week Coroner Theodore J. Curphey picked Litman and Farberow to study all the available evidence and tell him as much as anybody possibly could about what had been going on in Marilyn Monroe's mind before her death...