November of the Soul
The Enigma of Suicide
Introduction
During the months that followed September 11, 2001, I could not help noticing what pains the op-ed pages of America's newspapers took to make clear that the terrorists who steered jets into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were not real suicides. The implication was that these men had nothing in common with the troubled souls we think of -- and feel compassion toward -- when we hear the profoundly unsettling word suicide.
It is understandable that we would be reluctant to find any commonality between unhappy people who deserve our sympathy and mass murderers -- and, to be sure, there are great differences. And yet the terrorists were suicides, albeit of a particular but hardly unique strand in the history of self-destructive behavior. Indeed, the post-9/11 editorialists seemed unaware that for much of recorded history, suicide has been seen primarily not as a private act of desperation but as a public statement with a larger social meaning. Suicides have often been depicted not as miserable, helpless victims but as r ... read full excerpt from: November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide ebook
