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.
