Bridge

Suicide and Its Afterlife in an American Family, 1890-2020

My family shares a secret with many other Americans: beginning in 1890, multiple family members committed suicide. In 1987, nearly a hundred years after the first of these events, my father ended his own life on a bridge outside of Albany. Decades after my father’s suicide, we discovered our family’s multi-generational history of suicide. As a historian of medicine, I set out to explore the connections between my family’s experiences of suicide and the ways in which Americans have traditionally viewed suicide and depression.

ABOUT BRIDGE

In uncovering both the personal and collective experience of suicide, I untangle the origins of modern America’s deep-seated myths about why people kill themselves and the ways in which American families have grappled with the grief, anger, shame, and confusion that follow.

I examine my own experiences of depression in the context of suicidal depressions experienced by my grandfather in the 1940s, my great-grandfather in the 1890s, and my father in the 1970s. 

Bridge: Suicide and Its Afterlife in an American Family uses my own family’s multi-generational history of suicide to explore the secretive nature of mental illness and depression: who experiences it, how and why people hide serious depression, and what happens in the wake of a suicide.

I bring readers into not only archives but also historical sites such as the abandoned nineteenth-century mental hospital where my great-grandmother was incarcerated after her first suicide attempt.

And I speak to the nation’s leading experts in the genetics of depression and suicide, seeking an answer to why suicide appears to dominate so many family histories.

Yet in letter after letter, I saw shame: “we have never told anyone” was a constant refrain. What was there about suicide that made everyone so afraid to admit it had happened in their family? 

Yet in letter after letter, I saw shame: “we have never told anyone” was a constant refrain. What was there about suicide that made everyone so afraid to admit it had happened in their family? 

Contact Me