| Summary: | Suicide is a controversial phenomenon that people of different cultures and evenof different epochs have had difficulty naming. It used to be an enduring themeof many medical, psychological, philosophical, and moralistic discussions. It is aparadoxical act of ultimate self-destruction, a flight from life to death. To commitsuicide is to overcome the fear of personal death and to make a step into nothingness.Such a desperately brave deed requires an abandonment of one’s sense ofimmortality, which we all have, a change of values and worldviews. But if one’ssuicide attempt proves unsuccessful, the question becomes how to explain to oneselfand others one’s recent act of self-violence. To discover these explanations, weconducted a study of 319 people, ranging in age from 18 to 25; they were all eitherstudents (n = 156) or patients in an emergency toxicology ward (people who hadattempted to poison themselves, n = 163). This article summarizes theories of suicidalbehavior and of the fear of death together with the ideas of cultural anthropologistE. Becker on these matters and puts suicide into the terror-managementperspective. The suicidal act is viewed as a mortality salience, and the hypothesisis that people who deny their recent suicide attempt (n = 33) and who have one (n= 95) or several (n = 35) suicide attempts in their personal history exhibit differentterror-management patterns in comparison with each other and with the controlgroup. They fall back on different resources with various degrees of effectiveness.Implications of these results for understanding suicidal and postsuicidal behaviorare discussed and suggestions for rehabilitation are made.
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