In Night Falls Fast, Kay Redfield Jamison intermingles dispassionate scientific expositions with personal, compelling, and poignant accounts. Her book on the sobering topic of suicide begins with the story of Jack Ryan, a very close friend of hers, with whom she shared the experience of profound depression and thoughts and plans of suicide. Knowing the lethal danger of their situations, they made a mutual suicide prevention pact: if one of them contemplated suicide, he or she would call the other and agree to spend one week on Cape Cod together with the aim of reversing the decision to end his or her life. Even before her revelation that he subsequently died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, we the readers are not surprised that the pact didn't work.
The presumed reason for the pact's failure is articulated later in the book. Jamison writes, "Suicide is simply the end of what I could bear.… No amount of love from or for other people… could help. No advantage of a caring family… was enough to overcome the pain and hopelessness I felt.… I knew my life to be in shambles, and I believed—incontestably—that my family, friends, and patients would be better off without me."
In addition to Ryan's story are others involving well-known people who made suicide attempts or completed a suicide, including authors Graham Greene and Edgar Allen Poe, Washington, D.C., councilman John Wilson, and movie director Joshua Logan.
The book is also a compendium of facts about suicide, beginning with a history of accounts of suicide and society's response to the act. For example, suicide victims in ancient Athens were denied funeral rights, and mourners were shunned by community members. Suicide methods have included drinking boiling water, pushing broom handles down throats, thrusting darning needles into abdomens, and gulping down leather and iron. The lure of favorite spots, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, is described.
The book covers what we know about the biology of suicide and its treatment and prevention. The epidemiology, genetics, and methods of suicide as well as its relationship with psychiatric illness are all well described, as is the connection between the hopelessness and pessimism of depression and suicide. Jamison also discusses the dangers of romanticization of suicide, particularly for teenagers, among whom suicide epidemics can occur.
Night Falls Fastis an interesting, sobering, and moving read. I recommend it.
