Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I find it hard to say that a book about suicide is a good read but this diminutive collection of essays about the meaning of suicide made a big impression on me. In the preface to Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide, Lisa Lieberman says, "The thread that runs through all [five essays] is my appreciation of self-destruction as a meaningful gesture, a statement that holds more than private significance. A statement, moreover, that is essentially subversive...This book charts the tension between society's interest in restraining suicide's disruptive power and the individual's freedom to determine the meaning of his own death."
While acknowledging that her argument about such a painful topic will make some people uncomfortable, the author succeeds in presenting her views in a nuanced and thoughtful way that always respects the reader's right to think and feel differently. Her interwoven essays exploring different dimensions of self-destruction draw the wary reader's eye with such intriguing titles as "Defiant Death," "Sex and Suicide," and "Death and Democracy." Lieberman says that she intentionally chose the essay format to "allow readers room for their own thoughts." With her deeply felt commitment to the topic, combined with extensive research and a warm narrative voice, she offers readers much more. She creates the intellectual and emotional spaciousness for us to examine our assumptions about and reflect upon our experiences of suicide, whether the act has touched our lives directly - as in her case - or has gained our attention from a distance.
Lieberman's exploration of the meaning of suicide brings to mind another thought provoking book I recently read about the nature of anger. In Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris argues that anger is not a disease with a single cause, nor is depression simply anger turned inward, as contemporary medical and psychological models of the emotions would have us believe. Instead, anger in its many forms - rage, hatred, violence, chronic resentment - is "a process, a transaction, a way of communicating." Similarly, Lieberman could have named her book Suicide: The Misunderstood Act because she expands our contextual understanding of suicide as something more than an incomprehensible act of individual despair. This isn't to say that she dismisses the advances in neuropsychology that are enabling us to effectively treat depression. Rather, she restores to our current thinking about suicide the notion that self-destruction, contemplated or realized, is an integral aspect of the human condition.
In sum, Lieberman's little book rightly belongs on the bookshelves of every doctor, psychotherapist, medical professor and student as a companion to the clinical tomes on depression and related affective disorders. It also calls out to be read by the many professionals and volunteers committed to the work of suicide prevention, from college administrators to hotline counselors. It may even provide some measure of solace to grieving family and friends who have lost a loved one to suicide.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide

Click here for more information about Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide