Word: shneidman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...life is no 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...
...home ties, confronting new thoughts and values and undertaking the "search for identity." The difference today, many psychologists say, is that colleges force these decisions on students earlier, that the high costs and the tougher competition for grades apply more pressure. "It's unremitting anxiety," says Dr. Edwin Shneidman, a consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health and an authority on suicide. "Every semester is a rat race." More students today are also bothered by shifting sexual attitudes. If they are not inclined to take advantage of the new permissiveness, they may worry that they are latent homosexuals...
Layman's Guide. Psychologists Shneidman and Farberow reported their technical findings in a book, Clues to Suicide (McGraw-Hill; 1957), and put out a lay man's guide to suicide prevention in The Cry for Help (McGraw-Hill...