Book of Suicide Notes

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PESTIAN: But we'll also do the video with a camera and the audio with audio recording, and genetics are just a little toothbrush-like thing, called a buccal swab that you scrape against your cheek and then send off to be analyzed. 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.) 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. PESTIAN: Well, there's - again, we're not making diagnosis so there's never a risk with presenting the clinician more information and more data so that they can understand what's going on. But as far as a finalized test, we still have a lot of work to do.

Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman | Goodreads Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman | Goodreads

PESTIAN: So myself and the folks in my lab, we collected that over about the last five or seven years. A large contributor was Dr. Edwin Shneidman, who was the father of suicide research at UCLA, and Dr. Anton Leenaars up in Canada, and we work together in collecting these data and mining them together to create what we would call, from the linguistic side, a corpus.CONAN: And sometimes those of us in other fields of work think we have got depressing jobs. Reading those things and to analyze them, that's got to be sad work. 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. PESTIAN: You know, I think in the number of likes and ums in a sentence, yes. But other than that, it's pretty much the emotions are emotions. They just may say it differently. This, by the way, leads to the philosophical debate of free will vs. determinism. Durkheim rightly states that statistical facts do not determine individual cases. Of course, he didn’t have the statistical tools we nowadays have, but still he manages to explain why (for example) the average length is a social fact sui generis and how this doesn’t determine the length of any individual in a given society. And with this rebuttal, Durkheim also has silenced his colleagues who called him a medieval metaphysician: social facts exist sui generis, we can observe, measure and analyse them, and there’s nothing metaphysical about this.

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

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.Marriage often protects man, fatherhood often protects even more, motherhood often harms more than unmarried but to a lesser extent than any marital difference in man. A cynical idea is raised that where marriage/parenthood protects one gender it harms the other, and vice-versa. 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” 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