Contemplating suicide

Gavin Fairbairn

Suicide is devastating. It is an assault on our ideas of what living is about. In Contemplating Suicide, Gavin Fairbairn takes a fresh look at suicidal self harm. His view is distinctive in emphasising the intentions that a person has in acting, rather than external facts. Fairbairn constructs a natural history of suicidal self harm and examines some of the ethical issues it raises. He sets his philosophical reflections against a background of experience in the caring professions and uses a storytelling approach in offering a critique of the current language of self harm. He offers cogent reasons for abandoning the mindless use of terms such as attempted suicide and parasuicide, and introduces a number of new terms including cosmic roulette, which he uses to describe a family of human acts in which people gamble with their lives.

By elaborating a richer model of suicidal self harm than most philosophers and practitioners of caring professions currently inhabit, Fairbairn makes a significant contribution to the development of understanding in this area.