Top Highlights

• Over the last few years, I’ve spoken with many people who’ve been affected by suicide and the basic narrative she describes, of high expectations leading to failure, leading to a rejection of the self and an impulse to finish it all off, has emerged again and again.
• One way of looking at suicide is as a catastrophic breakdown in the human self. It’s the most extreme form of self-harm there is. Even if you haven’t actively plotted your own death, many people have surely experienced at least a fleeting thought: I could solve this. I could vanish. I have reason to suspect that this kind of thinking, although tabo...
• Today, over a twelve-month period, between 8 and 10 per cent of the entire adult population of the US and UK uses antidepressants.
• Today more people die by suicide than in all the wars, terrorist attacks, murders and government executions combined. According to the World Health Organisation, in 2012, 11.4 people out of every 100,000 died by self-harm versus 8.8 people as a result of interpersonal violence, collective violence and legal intervention. Its projections indicate th...
• Could it be, I began to wonder, something to do with that pattern I’d detected, in myself and others? Something about high expectations and then disappointment and then a terrible, gathering loathing of the self?