Each year, approximately 500,000 Americans attempt suicide, resulting in anywhere from 30-40,000 deaths. But there are millions of others that, while not making overt attempts to take their lives, still engage in patterns of behavior, from addictions to dangerous physical acts, that seem to deliberately move them toward the same fate.

This volume offers a description and analysis of subtle suicide—a psychological condition whose victims don’t care if they live or die, and thus act in self-defeating, self-damaging ways.

Over their extensive careers, psychotherapists Michael Church and Charles Brooks have developed the concept of “subtle suicide,” a development of risky behavior where the subject does not care if he/she lives or dies. Now, in this urgent and informative new work, Church and Brooks present their findings on a condition that is often misdiagnosed as a symptom of addictive or mood disorders, when in fact subtle suicide the real underlying problem.

Based on thousands of hours of sessions with real clients and filled with dramatic case studies, Subtle Suicide: Our Silent Epidemic of Ambivalence about Living will help professionals, families, and friends to realize when someone may be suffering from subtle suicide. The authors also provide a number of strategies for helping those exhibiting subtle suicidal behavior, including how to react to specific types of comments and how to avoid being pulled into the sufferer’s emotional whirlpool.

• Two distinguished authors, who developed the clinical concept of subtle suicide
• Dozens of case studies based on actually psychotherapy clients diagnosed as suffering from subtle suicide
• Biographical sketches of well-known people who exhibited subtle suicide behavior, including Marilyn Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith, Jim Morrison, and Evel Knievel
• An extensive bibliography of print and online resources on a full range of topics related to subtle suicide and conditions that feed into it