Edwin S. Shneidman

Edwin S. Shneidman (born May 13, 1918, York, Pennsylvania, United States – May 15, 2009, Los Angeles, California, United States) was an American suicidologist and thanatologist. Along with co-workers from the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center Shneidman provided a major stimulus to research into suicide and its prevention. He was the founder of the American Association of Suicidology and of the principal United States journal for suicide studies, Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior as well as Professor of Thanatology Emeritus at the University of California and lived in Los Angeles.

Works

 * Clues to Suicide (with Norman Farberow) (1957)
 * Cry for Help (with Farberow) (1961)
 * Essays in Self Destruction (1967)
 * The Psychology of Suicide: A Clinician's Guide to Evaluation and Treatment (with Farberow and Robert E. Litman) (1970)
 * Death and the College Student: A Collection of Brief Essays on Death and Suicide by Harvard Youth (1973)
 * Deaths of Man (1973)
 * Suicidology: Contemporary Developments (1976)
 * Voices of Death (1980)
 * Suicide Thoughts and Reflections, 1960–1980 (1981)
 * Death: Current Perspectives (1984)
 * The Definition of Suicide (1985)
 * Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior (1993)
 * In this text, Shneidman coins the term "psychache"—intense emotional and psychological pain that eventually becomes intolerable and which cannot be abated by means that were previously successful—as the primary motivation for suicide


 * The Suicidal Mind (1998)
 * Shneidman investigates three suicide attempts—one of which was successful, another leading to death from infection several months later, and another unsuccessful—and the common features of suicidal persons. An appendix features a completed questionnaire given to one of his patients to measure her level of psychache.


 * Lives & Deaths: Selections from the Works of Edwin S. Shneidman (1999)
 * Comprehending Suicide: Landmarks in 20th-Century Suicidology (2001)
 * Editor — A compilation of previously-published articles on the topic of suicide, starting with Le suicide by Émile Durkheim—one of Shneidman's heroes.


 * Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind (2004)
 * An investigation into the suicide of "Arthur"—a doctor and lawyer who killed himself at age 33—with interviews from his family and loved ones and responses from psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists who knew Shneidman.


 * Managing Suicidal Risk: A Collaborative Approach (with David A. Jobes) (2006)
 * A Commonsense Book of Death: Reflections at Ninety of a Lifelong Thanatologist (2008)
 * An autobiographical memoir.