About the Research

The main research behind the book – apart from surviving my suicidality, that is – was the PhD I completed at Victoria University in 2006.

The PhD thesis was in two volumes, the first of which was the original version of the book, which was shortened and updated for commercial publication with PCCS Books (UK). Now that it’s a commercial, published book it’s not on this website for obvious reasons – i.e. I don’t think the publishers would be too pleased if you could get it from here for free.

The second volume of the thesis is known as the Exegesis, which is a scholarly commentary on some topic – in this case it’s a commentary on the book but also on the academic discipline of suicidology. The entire Exegesis is available here for those interested in the academic analysis behind the book.

If you go to the section on the Exegesis you can download the entire Exegesis or you can look at it section by section. It’s actually made up of a series of papers I wrote during my research that were then woven together into the final Exegesis document. Each paper is its own self-contained argument that can be read by itself. But together they make up the overall academic argument of the thesis.

But first and foremost, it is the book – in plain language – that underpins everything that I’m trying to say about how we need to think differently about suicide.