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"Picturing myself dying in a way I choose myself seems so comforting, healing and heroic. I'd look at my wrists, watch the blood seeping, and be a spectator in my last act of self-determination. By having lost all my self-respect it seems like the last pride I own, determining the time I die."-Kyra V., seventeen Reading the confessions of a teenager contemplating suicide is uncomfortable, but we must do so to understand why self-harm has become epidemic, especially in the United States. What drives teenagers to self-harm? What makes death so attractive, so liberating, and so inevitable for so many? In Teenage Suicide Notes, sociologist Terry Williams pores over the writings of a diverse group of troubled youths to better grasp the motivations behind teenage suicide and to humanize those at risk of taking their own lives. Williams evaluates young people in rural and urban contexts and across lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. His approach, which combines sensitive portrayals with sociological analysis, adds a clarifying dimension to the fickle and often frustrating behavior of adolescents. Williams reads between the lines of his subjects' seemingly straightforward reflections on alienation, agency, euphoria, and loss, and investigates how this cocktail of emotions can lead to suicide—or not. Rather than treating these notes as exceptional examples of self-expression, Williams situates them at the center of teenage life, linking them to abuse, violence, depression, anxiety, religion, peer pressure, sexual identity, and family dynamics. He captures the currents that turn self-destruction into an act of self-determination and proposes more effective solutions to resolving the suicide crisis.

Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified. Proliferating technologies command our attention. Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread. We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome. Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon. Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing. It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption. Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms. Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

This book finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism. In the process, the state has used psychiatrists and psychologists to furnish knowledge on undesirable populations, and psychiatrists and psychologists have protected state interests. Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, the book analyzes the transformation of definitions for normal and abnormal behavior in a vast array of sources: government documents, professional bioethical debates, legal motions and opinions, psychiatric and psychological scholarship, media publications, and policy briefs. Critical themes emerge on the use of mental health in awarding or denying disability to returning veterans, characterizing the confinement of Guantánamo detainees, contextualizing the actions of suicide bombers, portraying Muslim and Arab populations in psychiatric and psychological scholarship, illustrating bioethical issues in the treatment of detainees, and supplying the knowledge and practice to deradicalize terrorists. The book explores this troublesome transformation of mental-health science into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.

Erich Fromm was a political activist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. Known for his theories of personality and political insight, Fromm dissected the sadomasochistic appeal of brutal dictators while also eloquently championing love—which, he insisted, was nothing if it did not involve joyful contact with others and humanity at large. Admired all over the world, Fromm continues to inspire with his message of universal brotherhood and quest for lasting peace. The first systematic study of Fromm’s influences and achievements, this biography revisits the thinker’s most important works, especially Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving, which conveyed important and complex ideas to millions of readers. This book recounts Fromm’s political activism as a founder and major funder of Amnesty International, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and other peace groups. It reveals Fromm’s support for anti-Stalinist democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe and his efforts to revitalize American democracy. It further reveals Fromm’s direct contact with high officials in the American government on matters of war and peace while accessing a deeper understanding of his conceptual differences with Sigmund Freud, his rapport with Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, and his association with innovative artists, public intellectuals, and world leaders. The book portrays a man of immense authenticity and spirituality who made life in the twentieth century more humane than it might have been.

Should we feel inadequate when we fail to be healthy, balanced, and well-adjusted? Is it realistic or even desirable to strive for such an existential equilibrium? Condemning our current cultural obsession with cheerfulness and “positive thinking,” this book calls for a resurrection of character that honors our more eccentric frequencies and argues that sometimes a tormented and anxiety-ridden life can also be rewarding. The book critiques the search for personal meaning and pragmatic attempts to normalize human beings' unruly and idiosyncratic natures. Exposing the tragic banality of a happy life commonly lived, it instead emphasizes the advantages of a lopsided life rich in passion and fortitude. It also shows that what matters is not our ability to evade existential uncertainty but our courage to meet adversity in such a way that we do not become irrevocably broken. We are in danger of losing the capacity to cope with complexity, ambiguity, melancholia, disorientation, and disappointment, the book warns, leaving us feeling less “real” and less connected and unable to process a full range of emotions. Heeding the call of our character means acknowledging the marginalized, chaotic aspects of our being, and it is precisely these creative qualities that make us inimitable and irreplaceable.

We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others seem so effortlessly to enjoy. This book portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate—an experience that helps us encounter the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important as its triumphs, and sometimes love succeeds because it fails. At the heart of the book's argument is a meditation on interpersonal ethics that acknowledges the inherent opacity of human interiority and the difficulty of taking responsibility for what we cannot fully understand. Yet the fact that humans are often irrational in love does not absolve us of ethical accountability. In the book's view, we must work harder to map the unconscious patterns motivating our romantic behavior. As opposed to popular spiritual approaches urging us to live fully in the now, the book treats the past as a living component of the present. Only when we catch ourselves at those moments when the past speaks in the present can we keep ourselves from hurting the ones we love. Equally important, the book emphasizes transcending our individual histories of pain, an act that allows us to face the unconscious demons that dictate our relational choices.