Synopsis (Credit: www.amazon.co.uk)

Suicide is the third biggest killer of young people in the Western world, and in the closing decade of the 20th century it reached epidemic proportions. This is an analysis of the phenomenon of young suicide, written by a survivor of a suicide attempt. Using scientific exploration, case-studies and clinical research, this book tries to understand why suicide is so prevalent in societies which seem to have everything.

(Bought second-hand at Help the Rural Child Charity Bookshop, Main Road, Retreat.)

The book forms part of my permanent collection.

Everywhere in the snarl of tissue that is the brain, chemicals whip down fibers, tear across cell divides, and continue pell-mell on their Gordian rounds. One hundred billion individual nerve cells — each reaching out in turn to as many as 200 000 others — diverge, reverberate and converge into a webwork of staggering complexity. This three-pound thicket of gray, with its thousands of distinct cell types and estimated one hundred trillion synapses, somehow pulls out order from chaos, lays down the shivery tracks of memory, gives rise to desire or terror, arranges for sleep, propels movement, imagines a symphony, or shapes a plan to annihilate itself.

Inexplicable? Perhaps, after having read this excellent book, a little less so.