Jesse Bering, the author of the article, has recently published a new book on suicide. The UK title is
A Very Human Ending: How Suicide Haunts Our Species:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-Human...535217655&sr=8-1&keywords=a+very+human+ending
And the US title is
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves:
https://www.amazon.com/Suicidal-Why...swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538696337&sr=1-1
I intend to buy an electronic copy of the book once it is released in the US. (After all, my mother would be suspicious if I were to buy a hard copy of a book called
Suicidal.)
Here is the beginning of the first chapter of the book, which I think displays a lyrical writing style (a good thing, in my opinion):
Just behind my former home in upstate New York, in a small, dense pocket of woods, stood an imposing lichen-covered oak tree built by a century of sun and dampness and frost, its hardened veins crisscrossing on the forest floor. It was one of many such specimens in this copse of dappled shadows, birds, and well-worn deer tracks, but this particular tree held out a single giant limb crooked as an elbow, a branch so deliberately poised that whenever I'd stroll past it while out with the dogs on our morning walks, it beckoned me.
It was the perfect place, I thought, to hang myself.
I'd had fleeting suicidal feelings since my late teenage years. But now I was being haunted day and night by what was, in fact, a not altogether displeasing image of my corpse spinning ever so slowly from a rope tied around this creaking, pain-relieving branch. It's an absurd thought -- that I could have observed my own dead body as if I'd casually stumbled upon it. And what good would my death serve if it meant having to view it through the eyes of the very same head that I so desperately wanted to escape from in the first place?
Nonetheless, I couldn't help but fixate on this hypothetical scene of the lifeless, pirouetting dummy, this discarded sad sack whose long-suffering owner had been liberated from a world in which he didn't truly belong.
As for the article (which is also excellently written, in my opinion), I think that the first four of the steps (falling short of standards; attributions to self; high self-awareness and negative affect) apply to me at this time. Since I am not
imminently suicidal, the final two steps (cognitive deconstruction and disinhibition) do not currently apply to me.