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The Harvard Medical School symposium on suicide is one of the best known and best attended conferences on suicide in the country. Originally the creation of Douglas Jacobs who was joined by Herbert Brown, the symposium began in 1981 and has continued annually ever since under the sponsorship of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital. Jacobs and Brown are no longer involved, but they have selected papers presented during the years when they were conference co-directors, and collected them in this volume.
Most of the leading authorities on almost every aspect of the field of suicide have spoken at one or another of these annual conferences. Many of them are represented in this book, although the volume is somewhat heavily weighted towards representation of faculty at Harvard. Seventeen of the 26 chapters have authors listing Harvard Medical School or Cambridge Hospital as their primary affiliation. Douglas Jacobs, Ronald Maris and John Mack are the authors of two chapters. John Maltsberger and Dan Buie are coauthors of two chapters, and Maltsberger contributes additionally as a case discussant. Robert Drake, Charlene Gates and Paul Cotton are also co-authors of two chapters, as are Steven Hyman and George Arana.
The collection explores issues of psychological, sociological and biological vulnerability to suicide; suicide assessment in diagnostic entities such as affective disorders, personality disorder and schizophrenia; suicide in children, adolescents, and the elderly; psychotherapeutic treatment of the suicidal patient; and philosophical perspectives on the problem. Despite the range of subjects covered, the authors note that there were no lectures on the relation of drug or alcohol abuse to suicide during the years when they conducted the seminars so no chapter on this subject appears in the book. The same was true of women and suicide, but the authors have attempted to correct this by inviting the preparation of a special chapter that was not