Author Description

A young woman is abandoned by her boyfriend, an older man retires and feels worthless and lonely, a young man learns that his wife is having an extramarital affair. They all see suicide as the only solution. Usually, after a suicide attempt, people are treated in a hospital, where professionals try to work out the underlying psychiatric illness. Ladislav Valach and Annette Reissfelder, however, argue that suicide is not an illness but an action. Since this understanding is based on a high regard for everyday accounts of one's own experiences, the suicidal persons are given the stage in this book. The textbook presents twelve different cases after a suicide attempt. In the analysis of the conversations, attention is paid to the theory of action in everyday life. By presenting the long-term, medium-term and short-term concerns of the patients or the actions in the stories, practitioners gain a detailed insight into the underlying causes of the suicidal act and its treatment. The authors Ladislav Valach, PhD, is a psychologist and psychotherapist (FSP). He has conducted research and worked for the Universities of Bern and Zurich as well as the Swiss Red Cross and the Bürgerspital Solothurn, focusing on suicide prevention, social and preventive medicine and trauma therapy. He has also worked as a psychotherapist for 20 years and is the author/co-author of numerous books and articles in professional journals. Annette Reissfelder studied economics, economic history and psychology. She has been working as a coach for personal development topics since 2000. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.