From the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind: the first major book in a quarter century on suicide, with a particular focus on its terrible pull on the young. Night Falls Fast is both compelling and timely: in the United States and across the world there has been a frightening surge in suicides committed by children, adolescents and young adults. It is the third major cause of death in 19- to 24-year-olds, and the second in college students. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, an internationally recognized authority on depressive illnesses and their treatment, knows this subject firsthand. At the age of 28, after years of struggling with manic-depression, she attempted to kill herself. Her survival marked the beginning of a life's work to investigate both mental illness and self-inflicted death.
Weaving together a psychological and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays about individual suicides, Dr. Jamison in this book brings not only her compassion and literary skill, but all of her knowledge, research and clinical experience to bear on this devastating problem. In tracing the network of reasons that underlie suicide, Dr. Jamison gives us astonishing examples of the methods and places people have chosen to kill themselves, and a startling look at their journals, drawings and farewell notes. She also brings us vivid insight into the most recent findings from hospitals and laboratories across the world; the critical biological and psychological factors that interact to cause suicide; the new strategies being evolved to combat them; and the powerful, but insufficiently used treatments from modern medicine.
Night Falls Fast dispels the silence and shame that too often surround suicide; it helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to better recognize the person at risk, and to comprehend the profound and disturbing loss created in those left behind.

I Buried Above Ground: An Introduction to Suicide

1. Death Lies Near at Hand: History and Overview
2. To Measure the Heart's Turbulence: Definitions and Magnitudes
Essay: This Life, This Death

II Just Hope Has Gone: Psychology and Psychopathology

3. Take Off the Amber, Put Out the Lamp: The Psychology of Suicide
4. The Burden of Despair: Psychopathology and Suicide
5. What Matters It, If Rope or Garter: Methods and Places
Essay: The Lion Enclosure

III Pangs of Nature, Taints of Blood: The Biology of Suicide

6. A Plunge into Deep Waters: Genetic and Evolutionary Perspectives
7. Death-Blood: Neurobiology and Neuropathology
Essay: The Colouring to Events: The Death of Meriwether Lewis

IV Building Against Death: Prevention of Suicide

8. Modest Magical Qualities: Treatment and Prevention
9. As a Society: The Public Health
10. A Half-Stitched Scar: Those Left Behind

Epilogue
App Resources for Information About Suicide, Mental Illness, and Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index