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

It is also a detective story in which I use my own family’s multi-generational story of suicide as a starting point to untangle the history behind the secrecy and shame around this kind of death.

 Part cultural history and part medical investigation, Bridge reveals not only how common suicide is and always has been but also the ever-changing ways in which American families and communities have responded to and understood suicide. 

Bridge: Suicide and Its Afterlife is the story of how suicide, even when hidden, shapes American families and communities. But Bridge is more than simply the story of how families become caught in a series of painful events.

As the story unfolds, it moves from private tragedy to collective reckoning—tracing how suicide has been perceived, silenced, and survived in American communities over the last 150 years. My family’s story, in all its complexity, is exposed as the history of the American family.  

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? 

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