ABSTRACT
Introduction Anyone who has spent time with a suicidal person,professionally or personally, will remember the intensity and stress of the experience and recognise the range of associated emotions, from compassion and empathy to frustration, impatience and even anger. It follows that interested parties, and society as a whole, are engaged in a search for suicidal motive, with the aim of both preventing individual suicides and lessening in general the possibility of selfharm as an option for all of us. The act of suicide or self-murder is a complex one; it is an individual
response, linked to an environmental aversion. This chapter attempts to disentangle these two factors by examining first, the vulnerable person responding to what he or she perceives as overwhelming individual circumstances and second, the group processes that might lead to such a response. It will examine the definitions of suicide, the individual pathology and societal trends. Many of the resources and examples used are based on people in prison custody, as this is the context in which I have worked.
