If anyone would like to talk about the tragedy on Monday, feel free to comment here or in class.
Stay: The Social Contagion of Suicide and How to Preempt It
By Maria Popova
"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (public library), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide — a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies — of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.
To be sure, Hecht’s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude — after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we’ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention..." (continues)
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