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This volume represents an outgrowth of a symposium held at the Western Regional Meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1956. It comprises a series of eighteen papers dealing with clinical and sociological aspects of suicide.
The opening paper, from which the book takes its title, is a brief report by the editors on the tentative results of a study in which they are currently engaged. The material used in this study consists of psychiatric case histories, test results, and suicide notes. Unfortunately, the paper does not contain sufficient information to permit a detailed evaluation of the findings without reference to the authors' other publications on this topic. For instance, the statement that 'it is practically impossible to distinguish a potentially suicidal person from the details of his case history alone' cannot be evaluated without knowing what categories of analysis had been employed; moreover, it seems to require some qualification in the light of another statement, on the same page, that 'seventy-five percent of the subjects who committed suicide had a history of having previously threatened or attempted suicide'.
Other contributors—notably Moss and Hamilton, and Schechter—do make some specific statements about factors related to suicidal proneness which were found to emerge in case histories. For example, Moss and Hamilton report that in the overwhelming majority of cases of attempted suicide which they studied, there was a history of loss of a parent, sibling, or mate, most often in preadolescence and frequently under 'dramatic' or 'tragic' circumstances; and that this loss, in many cases, was followed by 'premature and excessive sexual activity, sometimes of a homosexual nature', giving rise to feelings of guilt.
One aspect of their study is described by Shneidman and Farberow in sufficient detail to warrant a more specific methodological comment. This is the application of the Mowrer Discomfort-Relief Quotient technique to suicide no