I want to thank you and congratulate you for choosing the book, "UNDERSTANDING SUICIDE." This book contains the framework to understanding suicide, methods on suicide prevention, and causes of suicide. Suicide is not a new phenomenon. Strikingly, accounts of suicide across the last millennium catalogue the same factors associated with suicide as those revealed by modern scientific study in western cultures; serious mental illness, alcohol and substance abuse, co-morbidity, childhood abuse, loss of a love one, fear of humiliation, and economic dislocation and insecurity.