"Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, an internationally recognized authority on depressive illnesses and their treatment, knows this subject firsthand. At the age of twenty-eight, after years of struggling with manic-depression, she attempted to kill herself. Her survival marked the beginning of a life's work to investigate both mental illness and self-inflicted death."--BOOK JACKET.

"Weaving together a psychological and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays about individual suicides, Dr. Jamison in this book brings not only her compassion and literary skill but all of her knowledge, research, and clinical experience to bear on this devastating problem.

In tracing the network of reasons underlying suicide, she gives us astonishing examples of the methods and places that people have chosen to kill themselves and a startling look at their journals, drawings, and farewell notes.

She also brings us vivid insight into the most recent findings from hospitals and laboratories across the world; the critical biological and psychological factors that interact to cause suicide; the new strategies being evolved to combat them; and the powerful but still insufficiently used treatments available from modern medicine."--BOOK JACKET.