Author's plea to suicides: 'Stay'

People contemplating suicide may not want to read a book that attempts to talk them out of it. But "Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It" does just that. Author Jennifer Michael Hecht lost two friends to suicide, and the experience drove her to marshal arguments against it.

Hecht surveys the history of suicides, from Lucretia and Socrates onward. She tries to convince the reader of the damage that suicide does to the community and family left behind. From a review in the New York Times:

In her eloquent and affecting book "Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It," Jennifer Michael Hecht presents two big counterideas that she hopes people contemplating potential suicides will keep in their heads. Her first is that, "Suicide is delayed homicide." Suicides happen in clusters, with one person's suicide influencing the other's. If a parent commits suicide, his or her children are three times as likely to do so at some point in their lives. In the month after Marilyn Monroe's overdose, there was a 12 percent increase in suicides across America. People in the act of committing suicide may feel isolated, but, in fact, they are deeply connected to those around. As Hecht put it, if you want your niece to make it through her dark nights, you have to make it through yours.

The author joins The Daily Circuit to discuss her book and the issues raised in it.