Book of Suicide Notes

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CONAN: The human interaction. So the computer might send up a red flag, but it's a human who's got to go in there and make a decision. Every 14 minutes, someone in this country commits suicide, and research on ways to reduce that grim statistic appears to be on a plateau. In other words, psychologists don't have much in the way of new ideas - at least, right now - except maybe for what's described as groundbreaking work on the notes that those who kill themselves sometimes leave behind. A team of researchers at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital use computers to break down the language in these messages of despair, in the hope that they can better identify those at risk. Many more studies have been done since Shneidman found his first set of notes, and much more is now known about the suicidal mind, but in many cases, it still remains a mystery. Rejecting psychopathic state. It would be an almost knee-jerk reflex to blame insanity as one of the causes of suicide. But suicide as an act from specific and voluntary intention, according to Durkheim, is almost impossible among the insane. These are absent in the manic in his multiplicity of shifting thoughts, the obsessive under his thraldom and fixity, the melancholic in the chronicity and lastly the impulsive in the automaticity of his thoughts; all are devoid of real intent to truly die. In short, the suicidal state felt by the insane is devoid of any real or concrete motive, as different as illusions and hallucinations to normal perceptions. By saying this is not at all discounting the fact that the insane really felt the pangs of his state, but to emphasise on its totally unrelatedness to external conditions. From the racial factor, he pointed out that if suicide does indeed rise from insanity, then why would the Jews with a higher number of the insane has one of the lowest rate for suicide? Durkheim suggests suicide is a constituent of society that cannot be eradicated, but when reduced, leads to a rise in homicide.

The Complete Manual of Suicide - Wikipedia The Complete Manual of Suicide - Wikipedia

CONAN: I understand you work from a collection, though, of 1,300 suicide notes. Who made this collection, and why? He identified 4 great “races” of Europe; Germanic, Celto-Romans, Slavs and Ural-Altaic, and the rate of suicide corresponds decreasingly with the list. And he shown that differences exists in the same race that lived in different countries. And so Slavs, who has the lowest suicide rate, remained low in Dalmatia and Croatia, but very high in the German states, such as in Bohemia and Moravia. This book provided the foundation for sociology as a separate discipline. Durkheim took a phenomenon that seems on the surface completely psychological -- suicide -- and approached it by studying broader social trends at the group level. The patterns he identified were remarkable. PESTIAN: Yeah. So you just sit down and you have whoever is in charge, in our case it's the social workers. We ask them a - the kids a series of questions. We ask things like, do you have hope? Do you have any secrets that you're hiding that you want to talk to us about? Do you - where does it hurt emotionally? And we listen to those responses.Suicide: a sociological study, by Durkheim, and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", by Marx. (Note the absence of any of Weber's works. Groundbreaking he may be, but a gifted writer he is not). The same goes for suicides due to imitation - nowadays this type of suicide has changed somewhat. Thus, especially devoted fans of self-killer celebrities commit suicide in the same way, Kurt Cobain is the perfect example. People usually speculates that suicide would be at its peak in the darker and colder season that will surely sparked melancholia; but the total reverse actually happened. Suicide peaks at the most brightest and mildest season; people actually choose the season with least difficulty to die. The closest data in supporting the seasonal data, would be the pattern that as the day lengthens, the rate of suicides increase greatly. What would explain this pattern? And this is also reinforced by the fact that 3/5 of the suicide happened in daytime, and peaked at the strongest heat; which is a time of maximum social interactions.

Suicide Notes | Columbia University Press Teenage Suicide Notes | Columbia University Press

CONAN: We're talking with John Pestian, director of the Computational Medicine Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. stars. This is a very difficult work to review. There's a lot of good here, but there's also a lot of bad. I'll start with the good. Anomic suicide. The mechanism behind this is a bit subtle. Men differs from animals in terms that his needs is not only physical, but beyond that. Animals could be satisfied with the filling of their void, but men are left with an increasing abyss over the course of history. As it is part of our nature, the legislature regarding the limit of our desire cannot be depended on the individual; it would be unlimited if this is the case. Being unlimited, it would again and again would surpass the means available, which would inevitably produce morbid effects. How can one reconcile the void between his Faustian needs and the means he can acquire? This contradiction would give raise to a state of perplexity. As Durkheim pointed out, one cannot advance when one walks toward no goal, or toward infinity. One is then trapped in the limbo of Zeno paradox; there is no real motion, except real torment. Thus, it is clear to us our desires and wants must be limited. But as it is a priori unlimited for the individual, there must be an external regulative principle. PESTIAN: Yeah, we took old data, and old, it wasn't - people weren't enrolled, but they were data that had been around. One example was where we had 66 notes that Shneidman had put together; 33 were from actual people who had committed and 33 where he went to a local labor union near UCLA and said if you were going to die, if you were going to commit suicide, what would you write? La obra me parece un camino muy aventurado a numeros que no son para cualquier estomago, datos que de igual manera te hacen pensar en la soledad, los problemas de vivir en sociedad, la culpa, el daño que se le causa a otros por el mero hecho de estar exsitiendo.

Dalam Suicide, kita dibawa pada gaya pemahaman ala strukturalisme yang luas dan evokatif. Ia berkali-kali menyebutkan tentang fakta sosial (social facts) sebagai kata kunci, atau sebuah substansi ekternal yang secara terinternalisasi dalam tubuh-tubuh individu dalam masyarakat, yang pada akhirnya membentuk pola dan kehidupan masyarakat itu sendiri. Itulah mengapa pada Hal. 278 dengan tegas ia menyatakan "it is not true that society is made up only of individuals; it also includes material things, which play an essential role in the common life". "Material" tersebutlah yang harus ditekankan sebagai fokus, karena ia juga dapat bermakna simbol hingga status yang dikonstruksikan bersama-sama. Following the previous bullet, Durkheim's categorization of suicide into various types. The types he describes may be debatable, but the recognition that all suicides are not the same is important. There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” This book is difficult to rate, as I recognise that it is an important and classical text for sociology. However, I found this extremely dry and difficult to get through. As well as that, I can't agree with Durkheim when he talks about the individual playing absolutely no part in why people take their lives. I also had problems with the sexism used as reasoning for several parts of the research. As marriage could be taken as a mark of proper societal integration, it showed that both marriage and having children are actually protective against suicide. Not all political upheavals causes increase of suicide, so again this exemption is apparent, and it confirms the law. A cohesive and animated society permits exchange of sentiments from one to another, leading him to share and enjoy the collective energy to recharge him from his everyday suffering.

Suicide Note Quotes (39 quotes) - Goodreads Suicide Note Quotes (39 quotes) - Goodreads

Society has its own free floating rationale, which developed over time and which is almost immune to individual influence. So, when it comes to such social facts as crime and suicide, we have individual emotions and opinions, while society as a whole has its own opinions. These two coexist and are bound to be confounded when individuals are confronted with social events (e.g. we feel enrages when a crime befalls a loved one, while society is much more nuanced, and we subsequently feel that punishment is much too weak.) Since the book was intended to be a manual, the author did not spend too much space on discussing the reasons and philosophy behind suicide, although he does rhetorically pose the question "Why must one live?". Wataru simply lays out the methods of suicide one by one and then analyzes each of them in detail. the first "real" book on suicide, durkheim was a sociologist who first started looking at suicide in 1897. the result is a landmark text in psychology, and the foundation text for suicidology. On standard psychological tests, individuals who had threatened suicide vs. attempted it showed more guilt, agitation, and aggression in their responses. Sentiments of suicide note-writers I thought it would be time for more Durkheim. I have only read one of his works, "Elementary Forms of Religious Life" and found that if it were possible for one book to change a life this would be it for me. Durkheim's meticulous reading of primitive religion (his term-"Elementary Forms" was written over 100 years ago) led him, seemingly inexorably, to the conclusion that when we say we worship the divine we are substituting the term divine for our own transcendental nature created when humankind first organized into social groups. It remains impressive for its art more than its science but I can still recall the emotional thrill of first reading his conclusions. "Suicide" is a different text in many ways, most significantly that it was a book written for professionals involved in the still new (very new) discipline of sociology.He uses Jews in Europe as an example, noting that "the long-standing hostility of Christianity toward the Jews has created unusually strong feelings of solidarity among them. the need to struggle against general animosity and even the impossibility of communicating freely with the rest of the population" results in compact and cohesive individual Jewish societies with very strong feelings of their own identity and unity. So instead of the expected higher suicide rate among Jews because of the constant social and economic pressure they were under from the state and their neighbors, there was a much lower rate due, according to Durkheim, at least partly to the ostracism which was responsible for their plight. He identified four main types of self-annihilation that he characterizes as "suicide among the sane." PESTIAN: But the machine was good about 90 percent of the time. And the reason why, we believe, is the whole idea of what we call psychological phenomenology where if you, Neal, see something, you interpret it the way you learned how to interpret it, and, I, John, see something, the same thing, I'm going to interpret the way I think it should be interpreted. Computers don't do that. People do that. Computers look at sentence structure, noun-verb patterns, things along that line. positivist sociology is an abyss of statistical correlational mania, the reification of said regularities into prescriptions about "normality", and a justification for present state of social control and repression. A seeming taking for granted of the present state of things.

Suicide Notes by Michael Thomas Ford - Booktopia

We tend to think that we, as individuals, are free to do and feel as we wish, but there are developments and influences on a more abstract level that guide and predispose us in certain ways. Durkheim mentions the pessimistic philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hartmann as sign of the times – a moody, depressed and dreary society is characterized pessimistic and nihilistic emotions. It is hard to escape this social mood as an individual. (Durkheim also mentions that only in a collapsing Athenian city-state/Greece could the stoicism of a Zeno or the nihilism of an Epicurus take hold of society.) CONAN: Explain to us a little more how this works. How do you get language out of them when they come into the hospital, and how do you compare it to what's been written in suicide notes? He points out that suicide has become an increasing problem as society has become increasingly more ‘civilised’ – as people become more educated and, concomitantly, as people increasingly feel they are themselves ‘individuals’ that are personally responsible for their position in life. Such personal responsibility linked with a sense of social isolation lays the ground for the possibility that people will choose to end their lives. England, with a more integrated form of Protestantism with its clerical hierarchy have the lowest suicide rate among Protestant countries.JOHN PESTIAN: Oh, thank you for inviting me. And just for the record, I'm not a pediatrician. I'm a scientist there.