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Life after Death: Surviving Suicide is a book about story: how story is told, how story changes, and how we define ourselves through story. Dr. Richard Brockman tells us the story of the first two decades of his life as it was altered by his mother's severe depression and, ultimately, her suicide. This is an intergenerational story of trauma, pain, and human isolation. It is also a story about resilience, love, and healing. In a style that is unique to Dr. Richard Brockman alone, it is an integrated story of intimate personal experience, rich history, extensive neuroscience, and psychodynamic theory. The talent of Dr. Brockman's writing creates an unforgettable experience for the reader that is at once emotional, highly educational, and deeply moving.
This book must be read more than once. Dr. Brockman is a well-respected academic psychiatrist who serves as a mentor, an exceptional clinician and teacher, and an expert in the field. His story is told in a way that weaves the reader in and out of various scenes, at times in a dreamlike state, at times in fractured memory experiences. His descriptions of the scenes are written in the way that a young boy might experience them: allowing us to regress to our own childhood, with unfinished sentences and unanswered questions. The memories are frequently repeated with various details and perspectives added, altering the memory ever so slightly with each telling. We begin to understand how memory and story can change as it is retold. Through his memories, we are drawn into the life and mind of Dr. Brockman as a young boy, feeling his pain, his joy, his hope, and his fears. In addition to Dr. Brockman's personal stories, the book contains a high level of academic neuroscience, including neurocircuitry, neurotransmitters, and neurodevelopment, along with descriptions of theories and discoveries of major pioneers in our field, including Freud, Pavlov, Hebb, Winnicott, Hofer, Bowlby, Darwin, Harlow, and many others. Upon reading