Why do people die by suicide? Thomas E. Joiner and his colleagues attempt to answer this age-old question by exploring two obvious yet insightful assumptions:

-People die by suicide because they can--that is, they become desensitized to pain and habituated toward violence.
-People die by suicide because they want to--they typically have no sense of belonging to a valued group or relationship, and they feel that they have become a burden to loved ones.

This book offers a new theoretical framework for diagnosis and risk-assessment of a patient's entry into the dark and obscure mental world of suicidality, and for the creation of preventive and public-health campaigns aimed at the disorder. More important, though, the book provides new, effective clinical guidelines for crisis intervention and for therapeutic alliances in psychotherapy and suicide prevention.