 |
Photo by Irene Fertik UCLA
Today
Professor Emeritus Edwin Shneidman speaks about suicide
at a UCLA Extension seminar given in his honor.
|
the father of suicidology
Probing the frustrated mind
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
To understand Edwin Shneidman, professor emeritus of thanatology,
the study of the phenomena of death, it’s important to know
two things.
First, that he was a sickly child who stayed home a lot, curled
up in bed with the Encyclopedia Britannica. And second, that Shneidman
believes that about 50% of what he knows is the result of perusing
the Britannica, a work he once reverently equated with the Old Testament,
the Koran and the Upanishads.
In 1973, when Shneidman was in his mid-50s, the Britannica published
seven pages of his writing on a subject that has been his lifelong
passion: suicide. Shneidman is a pioneering authority on suicide
with the David Geffen School of Medicine, founder of the American
Association of Suicidology and author of numerous books on suicide,
including, just recently, “Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind.”
Shneidman’s interest in suicide began with a 1949 visit
to the Los Angeles coroner’s office. As a budding clinical
psychologist, he was investigating the suicides of two men —
one of whom had left a suicide note. Although Shneidman had never
seen a suicide note before, the scientist in him told him not to
read it — lest he find his own prejudices in the note. Instead,
for experimental purposes, he began collecting hundreds of suicide
notes, including a number solicited from non-suicidal people, all
of which he also did not read. Then, with a colleague’s help,
he began to analyze the notes without knowing the writers’
identities or intentions.
A UCLA alumnus, Shneidman had been trained in John Stuart Mill’s
method of inductive reasoning — the process of arriving from
a number of particular observations to a generalization. Using the
“method of difference,” which lies at the heart of induction,
Shneidman and his colleague were able to tell with great accuracy
which suicide notes were genuine and which were not. Scientific
suicidology, it is said, was born on the day that Shneidman set
foot in that coroner’s office.
Suicide, according to Shneidman, results from “psychache,”
a word he coined to describe the unbearable psychological pain arising
largely from frustrated psychological needs. “There is a great
deal of psychological pain in the world without suicide,”
said Shneidman with the insight of someone with a deep understanding
of self-annihilation. “But there is no suicide without a great
deal of psychological pain.”
It’s a disturbing thought, given that every 18 minutes someone
commits suicide in the United States. It’s also why Shneidman
considers it his moral responsibility to explore the roots of life-threatening
psychological pain.
At 85 and no longer in the best of health, Shneidman spends a
lot of time thinking about his own death. But his musings are far
from morbid. What sets him apart from a lot of us is his profoundly
philosophical claim: “A rich contemplation of death and dying
makes that much richer a full participation in life and living.”
|
