Publisher's Synopsis
Suicide is a public health issue of the first order and yet one that is nevertheless kept hidden from the public gaze. The mass media turn a deaf ear to a reality that causes more fatalities than traffic accidents, governments fail to include it on their agendas and, in general, suicide is seen as an exceptional, almost fictitious event, something that happens to others. Yet it is a fundamentally human choice that, when made, lays waste to everything in its path. This profound, comprehensive book takes a look at the political and historical dimensions of the enigma of suicide up to the present day. Today, one million people choose to take their lives every year within a society that prefers to turn its back on what it cannot understand, seeking solace in the old-fashioned view of suicide as a crime or a sin, which has for centuries stigmatized this most extreme form of human suffering. Pérez Jiménez decries a manifest inability to understand psychic disorders, today reduced to the biochemical approach that holds sway in the pharmaceutical industry, and calls for efforts to make personal contact combined with an approach that takes the individual's voice into account, as proposed by psychoanalysis. Suicide reopens the debate on the limits of individual freedom, an area that raises such controversial issues as euthanasia and the concept of a dignified death. Many lives are at stake, as is the suffering of relatives and loved ones, for whom the cloak of secrecy simply adds in extra useless suffering for good measure. Facing up to an issue that can be dealt with, and one that certain international governments and bodies are now claiming is an emergency, is therefore a top priority.
