Why People Die by Suicide

Joiner does a very capable job summarizing our empirical knowledge about risk factors for suicide, and manages to pivot toward treatment implications toward the end. I appreciated his synthesis of various kinds of research (much correlational, given the topic, so he also adequately addresses the limitations of such data), and found this to be easy to read. The main reason I didn't enjoy it more is that he wrote way more defensively about his interpersonal theory of suicidality (that learned capacity for lethal self-injury, perceived burdensomeness, and thwarted belongingness are each necessary but not sufficient in isolation for suicidal behavior) than I think he needed to. He's an expert in the field, and I'm not aware of any major pushback about the theory. The data speaks for itself, so I didn't need to be given such a hard sell.