1. Deaths and Mortality, 2009 data, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm/.
2. Number of deaths from 113 selected causes by age: United States, 2005, http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Age%20of%20Deaths%20113%20Causes%202005.html.
3. Greg Jaffe, “VA Study Finds More Veterans Committing Suicide,” Washington Post, February 3, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-01/national/
36669331_1_afghanistan-war-veterans-suicide-rate-suicide-risk.
4. On HIV/AIDS see R. N. Anderson, K. D. Kochanek, and S. L. Murphy, Report of Final Mortality Statistics 1995, Monthly Vital Statistics Report 45 (11 suppl. 2), Hyattsville, Md., National Center for Health Statistics, as cited in Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York: Vintage, 1999), 23.
5. “Ten Leading Causes of Death and Injury,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html.
6. “Mental Health,” World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/mental_health/en/; “Suicide Statistics,” Befrienders Worldwide, http://www.befrienders.org/info/index.asp?PageURL=statistics.php.
7. Shelby D. Burns, “Suicide Rates Climbing, CDC Urges Intervention,” PsyWeb.com, http://www.psyweb.com/news/treatment/suicide-rates-climbing-cdc-urges-intervention.
8. David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (Basil, U.K.: Collection of English Classics, 1799), 2.
9. Pat Conroy, My Reading Life (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2010), 11.
10. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 1: 6.
1. All biblical citations are from the King James Version.
2. Pseudo-Apollodorus, mythographer, first century B.C.E., in Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus, trans. Michael Simpson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 3.15.4.
3. Hyginus, Poetic Astronomy 2.4; Pseudo-Hyginus, mythographer, first century B.C.E., both quoted in The Myths of Hyginus, ed. Mary Grant (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960), 186.
4. Hyginus, Fables 141, 117.
5. Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis: The Greeks, ed. Od Hatzopoulos (Athens: Kaktos, 1992), 1375–78.
6. Anton Liberalis, The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: A Translation with a Commentary, trans. Francis Celoria (New York: Rout-ledge, 1992), 84.
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), 372.
8. Ibid., 96.
9. Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis, 1249–52.
10. Euripides, The Madness of Hercules (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University, 1979), 3: 1347–52.
11. Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Cambridge: Loeb Classic Library, Harvard University, 1918), 120–23.
12. Plutarch, “The Bravery of Women,” in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 11: 249.
13. Hippocrates, trans. William Henry Samuel Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2: 185–217.
14. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoceceus,” in Diogenes Laertuis, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert Drew Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 649–50.
15. M. J. Cooper, “Greek Philosophers on Euthanasia and Suicide,” in Suicide and Euthanasia, ed. A. B. Brody (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 9–38.
16. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. and ed. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 26–27.
17. Pliny the Younger attributes his information to a conversation he had with Arria’s granddaughter, Fannia. Pliny the Younger, The Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 152–53.
18. Ibid.
19. Virgil, The Aeneid, translation mine, end of chapter 4. For a full modern translation, see: Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Sarah Ruden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 89.
20. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 1.48.116–17.
21. Plutarch, Parallel Lives, 247. Porcia’s suicide is also discussed in Cassius Dio, Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1927), 5: 217; Appian, Roman History, trans. Horace White (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1913), 4: 371; and Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings (De factis dictisque memorabilibus), trans. Henry John Walker (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 145.
22. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, trans. E. Phillips Barker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 77: 15; George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 51.
23. The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Peabody, MA: Hendrikson, 1987), 389–406.
1. Eusebius Pamphilius, The History of the Church, trans. Valesius (Cambridge: John Hayes, Printer to the University, 1683), 146–47.
2. Kalman Kaplan, “The Death of Jesus and Anti-Semitism,” in Jewish Approaches to Suicide, Martydom, and Euthanasia, ed. Kalman J. Kaplan and Matthew B. Schwartz (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1998), 38.
3. Ibid., 39.
4. Ibid., 43.
5. Ignatius, Epistles: Early Christian Writings, ed. B. Radice (Baltimore: Penquin, 1968), 9.
6. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009), 29.
7. Ibid. On “Thou shall not kill,” 24–25; on Lucretia, 22–23.
8. The Councils of Antisido, Braga, and others are mentioned in Nils Retterstol, Suicide: A European Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17.
9. Koran, trans. Yusuf Ali, 4: 29–30.
10. Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 8, book 73, no. 126.
11. Emile Durkheim, Suicide, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1979), 327.
12. Maher Hathout, “The Suicide Culture,” Muslim Public Affairs Council, http://www.mpac.org/programs/anti-terrorism-campaign/islamic-views-regarding-terrorism-and-suicidem/the-suicide-culture.php.
13. Muhammad S. al-Munajjid, “Ruling on Committing Suicide Because of Depression,” Islam QA, http://islamqa.info/en/ref/111938.
14. George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 55.
15. The Council of Hertford and the Canon attributed to King Edgar are mentioned in Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 18–19. The Council of Toledo is noted in George Howe Colt, The Enigma of Suicide (New York: Summit, 1991), 158.
16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Richard Murphy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), 55–73.
17. Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident: De 1200 a nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIII siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1977).
18. Minois, History of Suicide, 9.
19. Quoted in MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 50.
20. Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), book 2, 107.
21. The Ethics of the Fathers, 4: 22, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2032/jewish/Chapter-Four.htm.
22. Minois, History of Suicide, 75.
23. Martin Luther, Memoirs, ed. and trans. Jules Michelet (1854; Paris: Mercure de France, 1990), quoted in Minois, History of Suicide, 72.
24. Quoted in MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 60–61.
25. John Foxe, Book of Martyrs; or, The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (Philadelphia: Smith, 1856), 471.
26. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007).
1. Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch’s View of Human Life, trans. Mrs. Dobson (London, 1791), 310–12.
2. Ibid., 307–8.
3. Minois dates this as beginning around 1570. George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66.
4. John Harington, British Library manuscript, cited in Paul S. Seaver, “Suicide and the Vicar General in London,” in From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004): 25–47, quotation on 39.
5. Fedja Anzelewsky, Durer: His Art and Life (London: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1992), 191.
6. William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 82.
7. Ibid., 309.
8. Ibid., 271.
9. Ibid., 158.
10. Ibid., 657.
11. Seaver, “Suicide and the Vicar General,” 28–29.
12. Michel Montaigne, “A Custom of the Island of Cea,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 253.
13. Ibid., 253.
14. Ibid., 254.
15. Ibid., 254–55.
16. Ibid., 255.
17. Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 272.
18. Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” in Essays, 308–9.
19. Ibid., 309–10.
20. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, ed. George Stanhope (London: Tonson et al., n.d.), 230.
21. John Donne, Biathanotos: A Declaration of that Paradox or Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sin, that it may never be otherwise (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648), 18.
22. Ibid., 191.
23. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger, 1991), 2: 499–500.
24. Ibid., 1: 16.
25. Ibid., 2: 884, 964, 949, 970.
26. Ibid., 2: 942.
27. Vera Lind, “The Suicidal Mind and Body: Example for Northern Germany,” in From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 64–80, esp. 67–77.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. Arne Jansson, “Suicidal Murders in Stockholm,” ibid., 81–99.
30. Ibid., 99.
1. Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 5.
2. Quoted in George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 180.
3. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 69.
4. Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (London: J. Tonson, 1713), 53.
5. Minois, History of Suicide, 187.
6. Ibid., 181.
7. Ibid., 190.
8. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. W. E. Greenhill (London: Macmillan, 1904), 69.
9. John Henley, Cato Condemned; or, The Case and History of Self Murder, Argued and Displayed at Large, on the Principles of Reason, Justice, Law, Religion, Fortitude (London: ECCO, n.d., photocopied reproduction of text published in 1730), 4.
10. Ibid., 8–9.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Ibid., 13, 17.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 17–18.
15. Ibid., 18.
16. Ibid., 30.
17. George Berkeley, Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosophy: An Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those Who Are Called Freethinkers (London, 1732), 34.
18. Ibid., 117.
19. David Hume, Enquiry into Human Understanding (Chicago: Open Court, 1921), 141.
20. David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (Basil, U.K.: Collection of English Classics, 1799), 10.
21. Ibid., 11, 14.
22. Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, trans. H. G. Robinson (Boston: Mendum, 1889), 136.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 138.
27. Ibid., 137.
28. Jeffrey R. Watt, “Suicide, Gender, and Religion,” in From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 149.
29. Voltaire, “Cato: On Suicide and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901), 4: 33.
30. Montesquieu, “Sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères,” in Oeuvres complete (Paris: Pléiade), 2: 485–86.
31. Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, trans. George R. Heasly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 129–30.
32. Madame de Staël, “Réflexions sur le suicide,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1861), 3: 179.
33. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (New York: Vintage, 1973), 59.
34. Ibid., 61.
35. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 108–9.
36. Michael MacDonald, “The Secularization of Suicide in England, 1660–1800,” Past and Present 111 (1986): 50–100, 114.
1. Plato, Phaedo, in The Republic and Other Works, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Anchor, 1973), 493.
2. Plato, Crito, ibid., 481.
3. Plato, The Republic, book 10, ibid., 298–99.
4. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 101–2.
5. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: Together with Death’s Duel (Middlesex, U.K.: The Ecco Library, 2008), 97.
6. Louis Richeome, L’adieu de l’ame devote laissant le corps (Lyon, 1590), 50.
7. François de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, trans. John K. Ryan (Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1975), 2: 226–27.
8. François de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. Allan Ross (London, 1937), 261.
9. Nicolas Malebranche, Traité de morale (Rotterdam, 1684).
10. Milton uses “talent” in a double sense: as we would use it but also in the sense of the gold coin of Jesus’ parable of the talents of Matthew 25:14.
11. Milton, “On His Blindness,” in John Milton: Selected Poems, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1993), 64.
12. Denis Diderot, “Marquise de Claye et le Comte de Saint-Alban,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1875–77), 2: 522-23; and “Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron,” ibid., 3: 244.
13. “Suicide,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Jeffrey Merrick (1765; Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.346.
14. Ibid.
15. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, “Système d’ Epicure,” in Oeuvres philosophiques (London: Jean Nourse, 1751), 2: 37.
16. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Julie; or, the New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 312.
17. Cited in George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 231.
18. Voltaire, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, cited ibid.
19. Voltaire, letter to Mme du Deffand of 21 October 1770, Correspondence, 107 vols., ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1953–65), 77: 34–36, cited ibid., 234.
20. Voltaire, “Lettres à Monsieur de Voltaire sur la Nouvelle Héloïse,” in Voltaire, Mélanges, ed. Jacques Van den Heuvel (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 404–5.
21. David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, The Complete 1783 Edition, http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sui-cide.htm/.
22. Denesle, Les Préjugés du public, sur l’honneur (Paris, 1766), 3: 425, cited in Minois, History of Suicide, 241.
23. Feucher d’Artaize, Prisme Moral (Paris, 1809), cited in Minois, History of Suicide, 241.
24. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 547.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 31–32.
27. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 4.
28. See, for instance: Jamie Laurentzen, Sober Cannibals, Drunken Christians: Melville, Kierkegaard, and Tragic Optimism in Polarized Worlds (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2010), 18; and Harold Bloom, Melville (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 132.
29. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Lee Fahnestock (New York: Signet Classics, 1987), 1183.
30. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1908), 131–33.
31. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon, 1983), 54.
32. John Berryman, Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2007), 252.
33. John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thorn-bury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 206.
34. Kate Miller, “Gray Noise: Walking with the Talking Man in New York,” Io, n.d., http://www.altx.com/io/gray1.html.
1. Amariah Brigham, “Note by the Editor,” American Journal of Insanity 1 (1845): 232–34, cited in C. Edward Leonard, “Confidential Death to Prevent Suicide Contagion: An Accepted, but Never Implemented, Nineteenth-Century Idea,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 31 (2001): 460–66, quotation on 462.
2. J. P. Gray, “Suicide,” American Journal of Insanity 35 (1878): 37–73, cited ibid.
3. Leonard, “Confidential Death to Prevent Suicide Contagion.”
4. Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 372–73.
5. “Children Who Lose a Parent to Suicide More Likely to Die the Same Way, Study Finds,” Science Daily, April 21, 2010. Holly C. Wilcox, Satoko J. Kuramoto, Paul Lichtenstein, Niklas Långström, David A. Brent, and Bo Runeson, “Psychiatric Morbidity, Violent Crime, and Suicide Among Children and Adolescents Exposed to Parental Death,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, May 2010.
6. Sally Cline, Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death, and Dying (London: Abacus, 1996), 273.
7. Fern E. Springs, and William N. Friedrich, “Health Risk Behaviors and Medical Sequelae of Child Sexual Abuse,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 67 (1992): 527–32.
8. Loren Coleman, Suicide Clusters (Winchester, Mass.: Faber and Faber, 1987), 30–37.
9. Elizabeth Gudrais, “A Tragedy and a Mystery: Understanding Suicide and Self Injury,” Harvard, January–February 2011, 2.
10. Bill Briggs, “Military Suicide Rate Hit Record High in 2012,” NBC News.com, January 14, 2013, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/14/16510852-military-suicide-rate-hit-record-high-in-2012?lite; Bill Briggs, “The Enemy Within: Soldier Suicides Outpaced Combat Deaths in 2012,” NBC News.com, January 3, 2013, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/03/16309351-the-enemy-within-soldier-suicides-outpaced-combat-deaths-in-2012?lite.
11. Mark Thompson and Nancy Gibbs, “One a Day: Every Day One U.S. Soldier Commits Suicide: Why the Military Can’t Defeat Its Most Insidious Enemy,” Time, July 23, 2012, 22–31.
12. Mark Thompson, “U.S. Military Suicides in 2012: 155 Days, 154 Dead,” Time U.S., Battleland, June 8, 2012, http://nation.time.com/2012/06/08/lagging-indicator; Alan Zarembo, “Their Battle Within,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2013.
13. Matthew Nock, “A Soldier’s Suicide: Understanding Its Effect on Fellow Soldiers,” Psychiatry 74 (2011): 107–9.
14. Nock cites J. J. Mann, A. Apter, J. Bertolote, et al., “Suicide Prevention Strategies: A Systematical Review,” Journal of the American Medical Association 294 (2005), 2064–74; G. A. Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic, 2010); and H. Hendin, A. Lipschitz, J. T. Maltsberger, et al., “Therapists’ Reactions to Patients’ Suicides,” American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (2000), 2017–27.
15. Bryan D. Stice and Silvia Sara Canetto, “Older Adult Suicide: Perceptions of Precipitants and Protective Factors,” Clinical Gerontologist 4 (2008): 4–30.
16. Maggie Fox, “Middle-Aged Women Drive Rise in U.S. Suicides,” Reuters, October 21, 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/10/21/us-suicide-usa-idUSTRE49K0MY20081021.
17. Rick Nauert, “Middle-Age Suicide on the Rise,” PsychCentral, September 28, 2010, http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/28/middle-age-suicide-on-the-rise/18824.html.
18. Phillips has also shown a rise in suicides after a suicide on a soap opera; David P. Phillips, “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 340–54.
19. T. Taiminen, T. Salmenperä, and K. Lehtinen, “A Suicide Epidemic in a Psychiatric Hospital,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 22 (1992): 350–63.
20. C. Wilkie, S. Macdonald, and K. Hildahl, “Community Case Study: Suicide Cluster in a Small Manitoba Community,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 43 (1998): 823–28.
21. The authors report eight suicides in a one-year period in a large community in northern Ontario; J. A. Ward and Joseph Fox, “A Suicide Epidemic on an Indian Reserve,” Canadian Psychiatric Association (1977): 423–26, abstracted in J. McGilvray, Transcultural Psychiatry 16 (1979): 216–17.
22. James B. Hittner, “How Robust Is the Werther Effect? A Re-Examination of the Suggestion-Imitation Model of Suicide,” Mortality 10 (2005): 193–200.
23. D. A. Brent, J. A. Perper, G. Moritz, et al., “Psychiatric Sequelae to the Loss of an Adolescent Peer to Suicide,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 32 (1993): 509–17.
24. S. Poijula, K. Wahlberg, and A. Dyregrov, “Adolescent Suicide and Suicide Contagion in Three Secondary Schools,” International Journal of Emergency Mental Health 3 (2001): 163–68.
25. Lars Johansson, Per Lindqvist, and Anders Eriksson, “Teenage Suicide Cluster Formation and Contagion: Implications for Primary Care,” BMC Family Practice 7 (2006): 32.
26. Frank Zenere, “Pathway of Contagion: The Identification of a Youth Suicide Cluster,” National Association of School Psychologists 37 (2008): 1, 6–7.
27. David Miller, Child and Adolescent Suicidal Behavior (New York: Guilford, 2011), 123.
28. Beth Hawkins, “Bullying Gay and Lesbian Students: How a School District Became a Suicide Contagion Area,” MinnPost.com, December 7, 2011, http://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2011/12/bullying-gay-and-lesbian-kids-how-school-district-became-suicide-contagion-a.
29. D. Brent, M. Kerr, C. Goldstein, J. Bozigar, M. Wartella, and M. J. Allan, “An Outbreak of Suicide and Suicidal Behavior in High School,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 6 (1989): 918–24.
30. A. Schmidtke and H. Hafner, “The Werther Effect After Television Films: New Evidence for an Old Hypothesis,” Psychological Medicine 18 (1988): 665–76.
31. S. Ellis and S. Walsh, “Soap May Seriously Damage Your Health,” Lancet I 686 (1986), cited ibid.
32. Elmar Etzersdorfer, Gernot Sonneck, and Sibylle Nagel-Kuess, “Newspaper Reports and Suicide,” New England Journal of Medicine 327 (1992): 502–3.
33. “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 43 (1994): 9–18.
34. E. Etzersdorfer, M. Voracek, and G. Sonneck, “A Dose-Response Relationship of Imitational Suicides with Newspaper Distribution,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 35 (2001).
35. In March of 2011 the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a public health agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, issued new recommendations for media reporting on suicide, developed in conjunction with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), among others. They are available at www.ReportingOnSuicide.org.
36. Madelyn Gould, Patrick Jamieson, and Daniel Romer, “Media Contagion and Suicide Among the Young,” American Behavioral Scientist 49 (2003): 1269–84.
37. Ibid., citing M. S. Gould, “Suicide Clusters and Media Exposure,” in Suicide over the Life Cycle: Risk Factors, Assessment, and Treatment of Suicidal Patients, ed. S. J. Blumenthal and D. J. Kupfer (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990), 517–32.
38. R. Ostroff, R. Behrends, K. Lee, and J. Oliphant, “Adolescent Suicides Modeled After a Television Movie,” American Journal of Psychiatry 142 (1985): 989. See also R. Ostroff and J. H. Boyd, “Television and Suicide,” New England Journal of Medicine 316 (1987): 876–78.
39. Gould, Jamieson, and Romer, “Media Contagion.”
40. Frank J. Zenere, “Suicide Clusters and Contagion,” Student Services, http://www.nasponline.org/resources/principals/Suicide_Clusters_
NASSP_Sept_%2009.pdf.
41. Ibid., citing Madelyn Gould as cited in Julian Joyce, “Unraveling the Suicide Clusters,” BBC News, January 24, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7205141.stm.
42. Ibid., citing John Henden as cited in A. L. Berman and D. A. Jobes, Adolescent Suicide Assessment and Intervention (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1994).
43. Ibid., citing Gould as cited by Joyce, “Unraveling the Suicide Clusters.”
44. Jessica Hamzelou, “Copycat Suicides Fuelled by Media Reports,” New Scientist, September 30, 2009.
45. D. A. Jobes, A. L. Berman, P. W. O’Carroll, S. Eastgard, and S. Knickmeyer, “The Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis: Perspectives from Research, Public Health, and the News Media,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 26 (1996): 260–69.
46. Ibid.
47. M. Gould and D. Shaffer, “The Impact of Suicide in Television Movies: Evidence of Imitation,” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (1986): 690–94, cited in Howard S. Sudak and Donna M. Sudak, “The Media and Suicide,” Academic Psychiatry 29 (2005): 495–99.
48. Matthew Hoffman, “Recognizing the Warning Signs of Suicide,” WebMD, 2012, http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/depression-recognizing-signs-of-suicide.
49. “U.S.A. Suicide: 2009 Official Final Data,” http://www.suicidology.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=228&name=DLFE-494.pdf.
50. Alan L. Berman, “Estimating the Population of Survivors of Suicide: Seeking an Evidence Base,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 41 (2011): 110–16.
51. A. E. Crosby and J. J. Sacks, “Exposure to Suicide: Incidence and Association with Suicidal Ideation and Behavior—United States, 1994,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 32 (2002): 321–28.
1. Michel Montaigne, “A Custom of the Island of Cea,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 255.
2. Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 273.
3. Voltaire, “Cato: On Suicide and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901), 4: 21.
4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 23.
5. Ibid., 198–99.
6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1: 389.
7. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 223.
8. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2: 309, 307.
9. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 280. In Roman mythology, Orcus was a god in the land of the dead.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 2: 399–400.
12. Ibid., 2: 399–400.
13. D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death,” The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (London: Wordsworth, 1994), 603–4.
14. D. H. Lawrence, “Healing,” ibid., 513.
15. Rudyard Kipling, “If,” Kipling: Poems, ed. Peter Washington (New York: Everyman, 2007), 170–71.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 91.
17. Between that confession and his direct reference to suicide are these sentences: “I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact. It is a pitiable state, I know. But there is only one remedy that I can see, and that is of course to come to terms with that fact. But this is just like what happens when a man who can’t swim has fallen into the water and flails about with his hands and feet and feels that he cannot keep his head above water. That is the position I am in now.” Ludwig Wittgenstein to Paul Englemann dated 6/21/1920, in Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 157.
18. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), 18: 162.
19. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 146.
20. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 797.
21. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 73.
22. A. T. Nuyen, “Levinas and the Euthanasia Debate,” Journal of Religious Ethics 28 (2000): 119–35.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? cited in The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20.
24. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writing, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 181, n. 24.
1. Emile Durkheim, Suicide, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1979), 209.
2. Ibid., 63.
3. Ibid., 389.
4. Ibid., 337.
5. Ibid., 337–38.
6. Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3.
7. Ibid., 8.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 63.
10. Ibid., 62.
11. Ibid., 65.
12. Ibid., 64.
13. Ibid., 54.
14. Ibid., 55.
15. “The Myth of Sisyphus,” ibid., 120.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 122.
18. Ibid., 123.
19. Ibid., 123.
20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (Paris, 1943), reprinted as Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Explication of The Stranger,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: The Stranger, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2001), 6.
21. Denis Diderot, Lettres à Sophie Volland, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
22. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), 2: 357.
1. John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, ed. Horace E. Scudder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 505–6. A hornbook, used by young pupils, was a slab of wood marked with the alphabet and other elementary educational information and protected by a thin sheet of transparent horn.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 269–70.
3. The Nietzsche scholar Cynthia Halpern has made this careful distinction: “The big problem … with all arguments that oversimplify the valuation or affirmation of suffering, is not taking seriously Nietzsche’s claim that it is not suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering that causes our greatest troubles with it. Any suffering like the suffering of surgery, or athletic training, or psychological therapy is entirely intelligible and purposeful, and therefore it is not harmful in the way Nietzsche wants to warn us against, as causing ressentiment, revenge, hatred of ourselves and of life itself”; Cynthia Halpern, Suffering, Politics, Power: A Genealogy in Modern Political Theory (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 210.
4. Calvin Trillin, About Alice (New York: Random House, 2006), 8–9.
5. Erica Jong, “Dear Colette,” in Loveroot (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 3.
6. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: Norton, 2010).
7. Ibid., 203–4.
8. Albert Schweitzer, Speech of December 3, 1935, to the Silcoates School, recorded in “Visit of Dr. Albert Schweitzer,” Silcoatian, n.s. 25 (1935): 781–86; Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story (New York: Dolphin, 1961), 229; Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Norton, 1986), 190–91.
9. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 231.
10. Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, ed. Lois Ames (New York: First Mariner, 2004), 251.
11. Tad Friend, “Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge,” New Yorker, October 13, 2003, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/13/031013fa_fact#
ixzz1rNATAJkP.
12. K. Hawton, “United Kingdom Legislation on Pack Sizes of Analgesics: Background, Rationale, and Effect on Suicide and Deliberate Self-Harm,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 32 (2002): 223–29.
1. Emile M. Cioran, The New Gods (New York: Quadrangle, 1974), 58–59.
2. Zilla Gabrielle Cahn, Suicide in French Thought from Montesquieu to Cioran (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 379.
3. Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1969), 7.
4. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2006), 335–36.
5. According to James Miller, Foucault’s longtime companion considered his suicide attempts the product of an anomalous suffering; James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 56.
6. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotex(e), 1996), 295–97. The book contains essays as well as interviews.
7. Thomas Szasz, The Theology of Medicine (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 73; emphasis in the original.
8. R. M. Martin, “Suicide and False Desires,” in Suicide: The Philosophical Issues, ed. M. Battin and D. Mayo (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980); M. Pabst Battin, The Death Debate: Ethical Issues in Suicide (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996); M. Cholbi, “Kant and the Irrationality of Suicide,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 17 (2000): 159–76; M. Cholbi, “Suicide Intervention and Non-Ideal Kantian Theory,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (2002): 245–59.
9. R. Bruffaerts, K. Demyttenaere, I. Hwang, et al., “Treatment of Suicidal People Around the World,” British Journal of Psychiatry, January 2011, 1–7.
10. Ibid., 1.