ABSTRACT
Many ideas about suicide contain part truths and part understandings. Perhaps many of the statements and pronouncements about suicide are made in order to make us feel more distant from our own connection with suicidality, to disavow ourselves from it almost completely. Suicide is more often misunderstood, misrepresented, and treated with great suspicion within wider society. In Europe within the Christian tradition suicide was denounced as a sin which was later embodied in law. Historical accounts of suicide depict instances of the bodies of people who have killed themselves being hanged; having stakes driven through their hearts like vampires; left at public marked sites—places of public execution. There remain other fallacies and myths and responses to suicide which bear further examination in order that we may better understand what we are dealing with.
