p. 7 “… one clergyman who was called upon…” Rev. Gordon Winch, for many years the director of the Toronto Distress Centre, told me many enlightening anecdotes about his years as a counsellor to the distressed and suicidal. It was he who counselled the attempted suicide at the Don Jail, back in the early seventies.
“… self murder…”Alvarez, Alfred. The Savage God. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971.
p. 12”… Even Freud expressed suicidal feelings…” Litman, Robert E., “Sigmund Freud on Suicide,” The Psychology of Suicide. E.S. Shneidman, N. L. Farberow, and R. Litman, eds. New York: Science House, 1970.
p. 13 Statistical and other valuable information is available in Suicide in Canada: Update of the Report of the Task Force on Suicide in Canada, sponsored by the Mental Health Division, Health Services Directorate, Health Programs and Services Branch, Health Canada, 1994.
p. 17 Keen, Sam. To Love and Be Loved. New York: Bantam, 1997.
p. 26 Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
p. 27 Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966.
p. 29 Crosbie, Lynn. Pearl Concord, ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1955, 1983.
p. 40–41 Solomon, Andrew. “Anatomy of Melancholy,” New Yorker LXXIII:42. January 12, 1997.
p. 46 Sanford, Linda T. Strong at the Broken Places: Overcoming the Trauma of Childhood Abuse. New York: Random House Inc., 1990.
“… a well-regarded handbook for grief counsellors…” Worden, J. William, Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. New York: Springer Publishing Inc., 1991.
p. 50 Fetherling, Janet, Canadian Literature and Modern First Editions from the Collection of Daniel Jones, Annex Books Catalogue 16.
Fetherling, whom Daniel had contacted about selling his books not long before his death, was understandably saddened by the loss of the engaging young collector she’d known over the years, and wanted the catalogue she published to stand as an acknowledgement of Daniel’s rare passion for books. It took me almost three years after his death to enter Fetherling’s Toronto shop, Annex Books. When I finally did go in, Fetherling told me that not long after Daniel’s suicide, another writer and book collector had sold his books to a colleague of hers and killed himself soon after.
Since then, the two book dealers had vowed that any time a writer approached them with a proposal to sell books, they would ask questions to determine his or her emotional state. Another writer did come along wanting to sell a collection. After some probing from Fetherling, the perplexed man burst out, “What is with you book dealers wanting to know about my personal life?” He had recently been grilled by the other dealer as well. When Fetherling explained, he said, “Janet, I’m fine. Just buy my books.” It was an amusing story, in its bittersweet way, and I was touched by the dealers’ concern. I guess we had all learned something that might come better late than never for depressed book lovers of the future.
p. 55 Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
p. 67–68 Etkind, Marc. … Or Not To Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997.
p. 70 Alexander, Victoria. Words I Never Thought to Speak. Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan Canada, 1991.
p. 76 Adam, Kenneth S. “Early Family Influences on Suicidal Behavior,” Annals New York Academy of Sciences [Vol. 486], 1986. pp. 63–76.
p. 76–77 Shneidman, Edwin S. The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
p. 100 “… mothers who lose their infants…” Rosof, Barbara D. The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994.
p. 107–8 Lukas, Christopher and Seiden, Henry M. Silent Grief Living in the Wake of Suicide. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
p. 118 Kim Gernack, a native suicide-prevention worker who worked in Hobbema, Alberta, during the early nineties, gave me many thoughtful insights and descriptions of the problem of suicide in that community and how it has been dealt with. Eli Allen Wolf Tail, a crisis-intervention worker on the Blood Reserve south of Calgary, also graciously took the time to be interviewed about his work and the problems facing his people.
One hopeful document that has emerged from another native community is Horizons of Hope: An Empowering Journey, which details the recommendations of the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation Youth Forum on Suicide for dealing with the problem among native youth in northern Ontario.
p. 120 Govier, Katherine. “Surviving Harvey,” Toronto Life, December 1996.
p. 127 Phillips, David P. “The Werther Effect.” The Sciences 25:4, 1985. pp. 32–39.
p. 129 Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
p. 130–31 Greer, Germaine. Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet. London, England: Viking, 1995.
Alvarez. The Savage God.
p. 140 “… studies on the links…” Gould, Madelyn S., and Schaffer, David. “The Impact of Suicide in Television Movies: Evidence of Imitation,” New England Journal of Medicine 315:11, 1986. pp. 690–94.
Berman, Alan L. “Fictional Depictions of Suicide in Television, Films and Imitation Effects,” American Journal of Psychiatry 145:8, August 1988. pp. 982–86.
p. 150–51 Landerkin, Hon. Hugh F. Report to the Attorney General, Public Inquiry into the death of Isaac Gerard Mercer, The Fatalities Inquiries Act, Canada, The Province of Alberta. January 1998.
p. 153–54 Boldt, Menno. Report of the Task Force on Suicides to The Minister of Social Services and Community Health The Honourable Helen Huntley. May 1976.
p. 156–57 Colt, George Howe. The Enigma of Suicide. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
p. 179 O’Carroll, Patrick, MD, MPH. Overcoming the Legacy of Off-line Thinking: The Internet as a Fundamental Suicide Prevention Tool. Keynote panel presentation, 30th Annual Conference of the American Association of Suicidology. Memphis, Tennessee. April 1997.
p. 190 “… Orville Powder…” Later that year, Powder left the Samaritans for a job as a youth worker in his home community of Buffalo Lake. Sadly, it was a return to violence and instability of a kind he had struggled to leave behind with his drug addiction. In 1999, he was stabbed to death at the Edmonton apartment of a woman with whom he had fathered a child, then aged eighteen months. His brother, Floyd Powder, has been charged with murder. Orville was thirty years old.
p. 201 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Justin O’Brien, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
p. 202 Parker, Dorothy. The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker. New York: Random House, 1959.
p. 205–6 Fenton, James. “For Andrew Wood,” Out of Danger. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.