Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide

by Lisa Lieberman

At heart, suicide is a subversive act: the assertion of individual will against public authority. How is it, then, that the act of suicide–one with defiant political implications–has come to be viewed as the last refuge of the self-destructive victim? In Leaving You , Lisa Lieberman explores the puzzle of this reigning perception of suicide. Drawing on diverse sources, from biblical stories to Romantic novels, philosophical theories, and psychiatric diagnoses, along with contemporary memoirs of suicidal depression, she shows how the idea of suicide as an act of protest has pervaded Western attitudes toward self-destruction, yet how our contemporary view attempts to deny suicide's disruptive potential by depriving the act of its defiance. Efforts to read meaning out of suicide are not hard to find today, Ms. Lieberman finds. Therapeutic strategies that treat suicide as an illness–medicating the depression while ignoring the underlying motivations that drive people to end their lives– effectively diminish individual responsibility for the decision to die. Sociological explanations that emphasize social causes over individual intentions serve to make suicides passive. Our reluctance to recognize the right to die, to concede this right even to the terminally ill, betrays our uneasiness with the power implied in the act of self-destruction. Ms. Lieberman aims to restore autonomy to the so-called victims by showing how suicide came to function as a vehicle for constructing identity.

Genres: Psychology, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Death, Mental Illness

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

I can date my desire to become a writer to the day I read a poem entitled "What" by Stephen Dunn. I was twenty years old and the closing stanza stopped me in my tracks:

people die between birthdays and go on for years;
what stops things for a moment
are the words you've found for the last bit of light
you think there is

Pretty much says it all.

Reviews

[John Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as research for a play about suicide.

When I came to this book, I was already aware from other reading that today's view of suicide, which usually attributes it to medical reasons (i.e., psychological disorders), seldom applied, if at all, for most of history and doesn't even account for many modern suicides. Lieberman's work, ranging across Western culture and even outside it, deepened and enriched my understanding. Some of my comments about the shortcomings of Kay Jamison's Night Falls Fast were the result of this book.

In my somewhat scatter-shot reading as research--in which I was looking as much for stories as for broad understanding--I'd count Leaving You as one of the three most valuable where understanding is concerned, along with History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture and The Savage God: A Study of Suicide.

[Sara Vidal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Centred on the European experience nevertheless an insight into the ultimate answer to failed expectations with identity, freedom, choice, attention, and the longing for perfection.

[Hossein Fattahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks so much Lisa Lieberman for your painstaking task of challenging the dominant and burgeoning authority of the individualized accounts of suicide. I acknowledge how difficult it is to write otherwise, and not resort to sensationalism. Your historicized account in tandem with a beautifully crafted prose enables us to acknowledge the cultural foundation of suicide persuasive and comprehensible. Personally, I felt at ease and proud to hear the voice of wonderful and "sane" people who took their lives where you squarely demonstrate the reductionist discourse of the interiorized pathology inherent to solely psychiatric/psychological models. By saying that, I do not intend to deify the stigma attached to the mental illnesses, which is part and parcel of the stigmatization of suicide. This book turned into one of my favorite books of all times, among all genres! Kudos to Lisa Lieberman