Shneidman, Edwin

In a career that spanned more than four decades, Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman was the chief of the first national suicide prevention program, at the National Institute of Mental Health; founded the American Association of Suicidology; and was the first professor of thanatology (the study of death) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until Dr. Shneidman took up the study of suicide shortly after World War II, the subject had received little sustained attention from researchers or clinicians. But as a researcher, theoretician, lecturer and author and editor of a dozen books, he helped establ...