Alternatives to Suicide: Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living

Alternatives to Suicide: Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living demonstrates how fostering resilience and a desire for life can broaden and advance an understanding of suicide. The book summarizes the existing literature and outlines a new focus on the dynamic interplay of risk and resilience that leads to a life-focus approach to suicide prevention. It calls for a treatment approach that enhances the opportunity to collaboratively engage clients in discussion about their lives. Providing a new perspective on how to approach suicide prevention, the book also lays out key theories on resilience and the interplay of risk and protective factors.

Finally, the book outlines how emerging technologies and advances in data-analytic sophistication using real-time monitoring of suicide dynamics are ushering the field of suicide research and prevention into a new and exciting era.

Focuses on what attenuates the transition from thinking about suicide to attempting itCalls for a life-focus treatment approach as opposed to risk-aversion intervention techniquesDemonstrates how fostering resilience can advance our understanding of pathways to suicideDiscusses emerging technologies being used in current suicide research and preventionOutlines the differences between risk factors and risk correlatesCovers real-time assessment of dynamic suicide risk

Part 1 Time for a paradigm shift 1. Suicide is about life 2. The implicit suicidal mind clings to life 3. Zest for life: an antidote to suicide?

Part 2 To be or not to be 4. The temporal dynamics of the wish to live and the wish to die among suicidal individuals 5. Daily monitoring of the wish to live and the wish to die with suicidal inpatients 6. Alternatives to suicide: a nonlinear dynamic perspective 7. Connectedness and suicide

Part 3 Through the lens of the suicidal person 8. Collaborative movement from “preventing suicide” to recovering desire to live 9. The “alternatives to suicide” approach: a decade of lessons learned 10. Psychological resilience to suicidal experiences 11. Textual analysis of suicide notes: how a new approach could yield fresh insights?

Part 4 Suicide and a life worth living from indigenous and refugee perspectives 12. Self-determination and strengths-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide prevention: an emerging evidence-based approach 13. Refugees and suicide: when the quest for a better life becomes thwarted

Part 5 Epigenetics of suicidal behaviors 14. Epigenetics of suicidal behaviors