num_pages: 280
description: Kushner (history, San Diego State University) traces American popular and scientific attitudes toward suicide from 1630 to the present, reviewing the apparent contradictions in method and theory evident in sociology, psychoanalysis, and neuropsychiatry. His argument for a multidisciplinary approach (a "psychocultural biology") is supported by his reconsideration of the etiology of several well-known cases of attempted or completed suicide. Indeed, Kushner suggests that all investigations into the etiology of suicide could benefit from an eclectic viewpoint and that therapy should be more holistic. He also reassesses the role of the American frontier in deflecting cultural tensions and deferring individual compensatory needs. For informed readers and cultural historians.
language: English
title: Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide
titlecomplete: Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide
genres: Philosophy, Cultural, Nonfiction, Death
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Rutgers University Press