Word: pretzelism
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...pins with all the fervor of kids trading bubble-gum baseball cards. The indoor hot spot is the Bavaria Club, a shadowy discotheque in the village's recreation center. In the rear of the club, couples in their multicolored sweat suits lounge and embrace in a litter of long, pretzel-like pillows strewn around the floor. The play is also heavy on the center's pinball machines, pool tables, miniature golf course and toy-auto racing course. For the more reflective, there is a "quiet zone" for listening to classical music. Other diversions include a theater for such activities...
UNDERSTANDING AND COUNSELING THE SUICIDAL PERSON by PAUL W. PRETZEL 251 pages. Abingdon Press...
...hovered near eleven per 100,000 population each year.) Though suicide is listed as the tenth largest killer in the U.S., even that fact is misleading since it accounts for only 1% of all yearly deaths. Choron spent years working in suicide-prevention centers. Like Suicide Counselor Paul Pretzel, he takes some pride in the fact that the suicide rate has lately been reduced in the highest category-people from 60 to 65. (Hope, says the proverb, makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.) Just the same, Choron feels that suicide should be made easier in a few cases...
...assigning of absolute internal or external causes for suicide-from sheer loneliness to Freud's famous death wish-founders on the mysterious (and miraculous) fact that under similar stresses some people kill themselves and some do not. Counselors like Pretzel naturally worry less about absolutes and man's right to die than they do about the necessary conspiracy of the living to help one another carry on. An estimated 90% of attempted suicides who are saved by prevention centers are pitifully grateful afterward...
...Pretzel also reports that only 15% of the 9,000 calls that each year come into the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center (one of the nation's oldest) are rated high risk. The judgment depends on a number of things, among them age, economic and marital status. Not surprisingly, the single are more likely to go through with it than the married, the childless more likely than those with children. Also important for friends and counselors, says Pretzel, is a quick estimate of how strong the caller's death wish is. A rough measure is how specific...