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Summary: This book is making my days and LIFE better!!!!!!!
Review: I found this book quite by accident laying obviously in the wrong place at the public library. I've suffered from depression for 7 years and it got worse and worse until I became suicidal. From page 1, the author's words caught me and I recognized myself in her. The best thing for me in the book was the Tricks of the Trade section where I was guided through ways to help cope and the almost 'work-book' like style. It gave me strategies and hands on things to try to when I needed it the most. I took the book to my psychiatrist and showed him what I was doing and he applauded me. Now my husband is reading it and I'd highly recommend it. The book is written in an everyday tone of voice, it's not medical, it's not preachy, it's just like talking to someone who's been there.
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Summary: This book has the power to save lives.
Review: I love this book. I sleep with it next to my bed, and I plan to buy additional copies for some loved ones.
The author has a wonderfully fresh and immediate style. She welcomes me into her book with warmth and grace, and she has a way of telling her story in such a thoughtful, natural way that I feel very much at ease in her "presence", even when the matter discussed is of a frightening and disturbing nature. I am not currently suicidal, but I have been in the past, and this book communicates perfectly the kinds of feelings I experienced at that time. I was fotunate enough to get through my situation-- and I can't help but imagine how this book might have helped me if it had been around then. Thankfully, it is now here to help the many in pain who need this author's insight and clarity.
Another thing that strikes me about this book is the fact that although it specifically targets those struggling with suicide, I find it to extremely helpful in helping me out of the despair associated with difficulty and tragedy in my life. The "tricks of the trade" that help a suicidal reader to find her way back to life also help me away from sometimes seemingly insurmountable despair and back toward feelings of hope and possibility, simply by reminding me that feelings are fluid and impermanent. They always give way and change eventually.
I love this book, and I highly recommend it to those having suicidal thoughts as well as to anyone who might benefit from a new perspective on finding one's way through the darknesses of living. I can hardly wait to read more from Susan Rose Blauner. Well done!
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Summary: I met her, She is awesome!
Review: I met Susan at the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Conference in Orlando, Florida. She gave a workshop on her book. Just because of the title of her book, I went running to the workshop. It sounded like what I was looking for. I related to her so much...her book is GREAT!!! She gives so many "tricks" to help the suicidal thinker, which I am. I have never connected to anyone as I did with her. She is living proof that I/We can make it through these horrific times. Suicide is not really what we want.....we want HELP!!! In this book, she gives many different things to try. The biggest help for me is to do the opposite of what my brain tells me to do...it's not easy. but I have that page marked and keep reading it over and over!!! It has helped. I have called 1-800-Suicide many times and they are wonderful. If you sufffer from depression and suicidal thoughts, this book may help you...it is helping me!!! Also, a portion of her royalties are being donated to 1-800-Suicide which really makes me feel good! I thank her for this book from the bottom of my heart!!!
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Summary: Dangerous assumptions
Review: I will start off by admitting I did not read this entire book. As someone who has struggled with severe depression since I was seventeen, the first few chapters made me angry, nauseated, and eventually frightened. This book will serve to fuel prejudice and contempt towards suicidal people, by claiming it's something that can be averted with a lollipop and a pat on the head; a hysterical search for attention. Obviously the writer did have serious emotional difficulties; but most suicides are committed by people with physical, chemical, mental illnesses, as dangerous and as un-asked for as diabetes or cancer. If you want to know WHY, read Kay Redfield Jamison's "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide". If you want to know how to make it go away, I still don't have an answer, and I can't trust anyone who claims there's an easy one.
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Summary: A Brave and Helpful Book That Will Undoubtedly Save Lives
Review: If you need to change a fan belt on a 1994 Fiat, you buy a Chilton's manual, and not a treatise on the joys of high-speed touring. If you need to make a lemon meringue pie, you get a cookbook, and not a memoir on the joys of great French cuisine. Car manuals and recipes are not always great literature by any means, but they are often necessary in helping to get a job done. Susan Rose Blauner's HOW I STAYED ALIVE WHEN MY BRAIN WAS TRYING TO KILL ME is nobody's idea of great, or even good, literature. From a purely literary standpoint, the book is chatty, tiresome and irritating, filled with sentimentality, New Age nonsense, and ghastly psychological claptrap. It has been edited with an over-gentle hand, preserving every little clich? and every annoying scrap of poetry and personal reflection. It is a book that very few people will pick up for pleasurable reading, and rightly so. And yet, it will undoubtedly save lives. HOW I STAYED ALIVE WHEN MY BRAIN WAS TRYING TO KILL ME is not, as you might think, merely a personal tale of survival from mental illness. It is primarily a manual, a reference book, a resource for people who have suicidal thoughts. Although the book is guided by the author's own experiences with mental illness and suicide attempts, it is written not to chronicle her life but to provide direction and guidance for others in the same situation. And as such, it is an undeniable success. Blauner's book is guided by several hard-won insights. Suicide begins as a thought, driven by negative feelings, and such feelings are temporary and changeable. "Suicidal," Blauner tells us, "is not a feeling." Suicidal thoughts are paired with feelings of anger, guilt, loneliness, and desperation, and it is necessary to separate those feelings from thoughts of suicide. Suicidal thoughts can be addictive, we learn, with romantic notions of one's death and funeral building upon each other. And these suicidal thoughts from one's brain war with one's spirit, which doesn't want to die, creating the conflict in the title. The heart of the book is the "Tips of the Trade," 25 different ideas, strategies, and plans that people with suicidal thoughts can use to help avoid harming themselves. The most invaluable of these is the "Crisis Plan," which is easily the best thing about the book. Blauner details the plan that she, along with her therapist, worked out to help her deal with suicidal thoughts. It begins with "Take a deep breath," and proceeds from there to prayer, activities, exercise, and phone calls to family, friends, and professionals. Applying the principles of strategic planning and crisis management to one's personal life may seem a little unorthodox, but it is undoubtedly effective, and may prove to be so for people with a variety of different needs. The "Tricks" are extremely varied, and more than a little eclectic. (This is to be expected from an author who describes herself as a "Jewish Unitarian Zen-Quakerish earth-loving type.") Not all of the "Tricks" will help everyone, and more than a few of them may seem a little goofy, if not out-and-out weird. Realistically, though, you never can tell what might help someone set aside a suicidal thought. If throwing eggs at trees, or sitting in a chair with a bucket between your knees helps someone, then it's a trick worth sharing, no matter how odd it sounds. HOW I STAYED ALIVE WHEN MY BRAIN WAS TRYING TO KILL ME is not an incredibly well-written book, but it is brave and courageous and helpful, full of resources and tips and ideas and strength for anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts or anyone with a friend or family member with such experiences. More than that, it is a book that is, quite simply, "normal," if not invaluable, in helping people in this situation finish the job of life. --- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds
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Summary: A well-examined life
Review: Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In "How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me," Susan Rose Blauner pursues a courageous and painstaking examination of a life of pain and suffering, discovery and remarkable personal growth. Bearing witness to history, culture, and personal experience is perhaps the most crucial responsibility of being human. With her willingness to disclose the details of her personal journey from despair to hope, Ms. Blauner has borne witness to a very personal struggle in a way that provides guidance to others who suffer similarly. This guide through the minefield of suicidal thoughts and impulses will inevitably save lives. While the author provides considerable insight regarding the nature and origins of suicidal thoughts, the heart of the guide is Chapter Three, entitiled "Tricks of the Trade." In this chapter, she offers a variety of practical steps that can be taken to overcome suicidal impulses when they occur. While every step may not appeal to everyone, there is enough variety to provide useful strategies for most people who struggle with suicide. Trick #19: Helping Others is particularly pertinent. I would add to this step imagining the possibilities for helping others in the future. Had Susan Blauner envisioned sooner the influence that she would eventually have upon so many lives, her will to live may have grown stronger years earlier. Perhaps the most crucial message of this work, then, is that it is worth going on if only to discover our capacity for bringing light into other lives.
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Summary: Autobiography of a Drama Queen
Review: This is an interesting book and a good resource. The book's title in itself truly depicts what happens in a suicidal person. In a way, it's not really the person that kills the self but rather it's the brain and the "chemical imbalance" associated with it that causes damage. So can changing the brain chemistry effect a change and save lives? Sure-that's what medication does. This is how psychotherapy works. In Ms. Blauner's book, several "tricks of the trade" were discussed. Asking for help, emergency contacts, and keeping a journal are just some of the practical ways of dealing with suicidality. Her "crisis plan" is a useful formula that a person should have to avert any self-destructive thoughts or behavior. Likewise, the chapter on spirituality is a gem. Written in a layman's prose, the book stands out in making complicated concepts (such as neuron and electrochemical transmission) more understandable and seemingly "easy" concepts, clearer.
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Summary: this book saved my life in a lasting way - NO EXAGGERATION!
Review: This is gentle, kind, loving, familiar, HONEST - susan has the conversation --- you're having with yourself --- with you. And talks you out of it. And talks you out of discussing it anymore... it may take a while to take, to completely sink in... but this book put the cabash (sp?) on my periodic suicidally depressed times (I voluntarily checked myself into a hospital twice - and the unreimbursed cost was going to be a few 1000 dollars - and I am CHEAP and told myself I could go to PARIS AND ROME on that money --- but knew that I had no more than 3-5 hours to live unless I got myself quickly to a place where I wouldn't be able to end my life. Also, this book just made me feel better somehow: not happy or OK --- but better. REALLY. A great gift to all of us. Thanks a million to the author!
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