http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=1064943

"All Things Considered, October 5, 1999 · Noah speaks with clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison about her new book "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide." Jamison talks about how anguishing depression can be, and how difficult it is for people to talk to friends, loved ones, or strangers about suicide. She also discusses the high suicide rate for young people around the world, and especially for young women in China. "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide" by Kay R. Jamison is published by Knopf."

I came across this on another site I posted elsewhere. I vaguely remember we talked about this a long while back. Just wondering if anyone has read it and if they would recommend it to others...

ta

It's a wonderful book Lara and I own it, refer to it often.

Kay Jamison is herself bipolar and another of her books, "An Unquiet Mind" is a must read. Thanks for the reminder!

I never read it, but one thing intrigued me about the high suicide rate for young women in China...

not in the big modern cities like BeiJin but the more country sides where farmers roam...

because of the one baby per family act...most families prefer sons...and when they get a daughter and if they can get away with it...they usually drown or kill them...

but currently, there is a big international effort about putting up these little girls for adoption...

there is a local couple here (the man was my constructions instructor) that has been to China and adopted a little girl a few years ago. They went back this Christmas to adopt another one...

anyways, just finding it interesting...

hope all is well in your neck of the woods, I've been reading about your drought and how crops have gone very expensive...thinking of you

I have been rereading "Night Falls Fast" since Lara mentioned it. The author, Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as Honorary Professor of English at University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Here is an except from her book "Night Falls Fast".

Psychiatric hospitalization is generally both frightening and reassuring to suicidal patients. It continues to carry a heavy stigma and to create personal, economic, and professional difficulties for many individuals. And as we have seen, it does not prevent all suicides. Hospitals do, however, save many lives, and they relieve not only patients, but also their family members and friends, of the terrible burden of feeling responsible for their own or another's life. Hospitalization is too often seen by both patients and their doctors as a symbolic defeat or as the treatment of last resort, rather than as an occasional necessity for a serious problem. These beliefs, which tend not to accompany decisions to hospitalize people who have other medical conditions, are pervasive and dangerous, and they stand in the way of good clinical care.

William Styron, who described his hospitalization for suicidal depression as a "way station, a purgatory," strongly regretted his doctor's reluctance to admit him to a psychiatric ward"

Many psychiatrists, who simply do not seem to be able to comprehend the nature and depth of the anguish their patients are undergoing, maintain their stubborn allegiance to pharmaceuticals in the belief that eventually the pills will kick in, the patient will respond, and the somber surroundings of the hospital will be avoided...I'm convinced I should have been in the hospital weeks before. For, in fact, the hospital was my salvation, and it is something of a paradox that in this austere place with its locked and wired doors and desolate green hallways - ambulances screeching night and day ten floors below - I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse.

another bump!