Why People Die by Suicide

Informative but can belabor its point at times which, when trying to communicate ideas, i guess isn’t the worst thing. I would recommend this to people who have either lost someone to suicide or those who have never understood why people commit suicide. This is not for those who already have that understanding unless you seek some sort of validation.

Joiner does a very capable job summarizing our empirical knowledge about risk factors for suicide, and manages to pivot toward treatment implications toward the end. I appreciated his synthesis of various kinds of research (much correlational, given the topic, so he also adequately addresses the limitations of such data), and found this to be easy to read. The main reason I didn't enjoy it more is that he wrote way more defensively about his interpersonal theory of suicidality (that learned capacity for lethal self-injury, perceived burdensomeness, and thwarted belongingness are each necessary but not sufficient in isolation for suicidal behavior) than I think he needed to. He's an expert in the field, and I'm not aware of any major pushback about the theory. The data speaks for itself, so I didn't need to be given such a hard sell.