ABSTRACT
With apologies to Durkheim, contemporary American suicidology can be said to have begun with the 1933 publication of Louis Dublin's To Be or Not To Be, an epidemiological study of suicide in the United States. Dublin was a vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and a statistician. His chapter, How May We Prevent Suicide? was the first contribution to a new field—the study of suicide prevention. Dublin's effort to spur research in and public awareness of the problem failed to catch the eye of the scientific or public policy communities, however, and it was not until the 1950s that local and subsequent national attention began to be paid to suicide prevention.
