“Encompass’d with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors....I...in fleshy tomb, am Buried above ground.” Suicide has long been interpreted, studied, and at many times ignored. The existenceof suicide and its whereabouts are not actually known. For the fact that no one knowsthe first person who intentionally walked into a blizzard knowingly that they will notreturn, or the first person who jumped off a cliff with intentions of not surviving. Nordo we know the first person who had the sudden urge to commit harm to oneself. Wedo not know this for the fact that the human mind is one piece of work and creationthat is still being misinterpreted today. These facts and many more are what KayRedfield Jamison, author of “Night Falls Fast, Understanding Suicide”, try’s toconvey and express to the reader. She directs her facts and studies towards teenagersand young adults who seek the knowledge of why people do such harm to themselves. Jamison expresses how the fact that what we do not know is what actually kills, alsohow suicide is one of the most unpublicized deaths, and the varieties of mental illnessthat plague the minds of so many to commit suicideJamison brings up the notion of how much we can determineabout a person through heredity. We can determine if mental illness exists, if there isa history of impulsive and/or violent temperament and also the social class of aperson. As stated “ It should not be necessary, at the end of a century so rich inliterature, medicine, psychology and science, to draw arbitrary lines in the sandbetween humanism and individual complexities”. We do know though, what candrive a person to commit themselves to kill themselves to a certain extent. Such asromantic failures, economic and/or job setbacks, trouble with law or authority, illness,a situation that may seem to humiliate one, and so on. But the true meaning of why ape...
