The Varieties of Suicidal Experience: A New Theory of Suicidal Violence. By T.Joiner, New York: New York University Press, 2024. 1–218 pp. $89 (hardback); $30 (paperback and ebook). ISBN: 978‐1479823475

Thomas Joiner's The Varieties of Suicidal Experience is situated in the New York University book series devoted to psychology and crime, and sets out to extend his previous work, arguing for an expanded recognition of who is considered, in public consciousness, to be suicidal. Over the book's seven chapters he works through arguments about murder–suicide, spree killing, suicide-by-cop, suicide terrorism, physician-assisted suicide, and death row volunteering using a number of high-profile examples familiar to the lay reader. Through this exploration Joiner makes the case that these acts should all be seen as primarily suicidal, and therefore that suicide prevention measures taken across the globe may also have the potential to reduce deaths by these other, he argues, related ways of killing and dying. Controversial within this, is that whilst some of these types of ‘violence’ may resonate with a lay audience as instinctively close to contemporary understandings of suicide (e.g., people employing physician assisted suicide, death row volunteers and possibly those who die as a result of suicide-by-cop); others, such as spree killers, suicide terrorists and the perpetrators of murder–suicides may perhaps be understood in a manner that gives primacy to their homicidal acts, with their own deaths by suicide positioned as secondary. Joiner's work through the text therefore is to persuade us that the ‘true’ motivations for such killings is not the murder of others, but instead the suicide of the self. I understood Joiner's argument to be constructed upon three central pillars. The first offered that suicidal people occupy a dual-role as both victims of killings and killers of ‘innocent’ people (wherein the innocent people could be the self or others). The second, builds on this to propose that the role of killer, as a constituent part of suicide, was for Joiner's evidence that all suicidal people are experiencing ‘psychopathology’ or mental illness (‘I know of no truer marker for psychopathology than the unsanctioned killing of a human’ (p. 38)). Finally, he proposes that suicidal people experience a ‘perversion of virtue’ (more specifically justice, mercy, duty or glory), which makes killing (whether themselves or others) appear to them to be the virtuous thing to do. To exemplify this, he uses the Columbine tragedy, proposing that ‘the boys involved in the Columbine violence began as depressed and suicidal, and then over time their suicidal depression grew in scope to involve the deaths of others’ (p. 68) he goes onto propose that this happened through the perversion of glory, through which the killers hoped to be remembered heroically for their crimes. However, for suicidal people who solely end their own lives, he offers that this could be through the ‘perceived burdensomeness’ (that forms the central tenet of Joiner's influential Interpersonal Theory of Suicide), which proposes that an individual may, due to ‘distorted perceptions’ caused by mental illness, believe themselves to be a burden on their loved ones, and that those loved ones might be better off without them. In making this argument, Joiner explicitly opposes any potential future co-option of his arguments to add weight to the stigmatisation or criminalisation of suicidal people (according to the World Health Organization, suicide remains criminalised in more than 20 countries across the world). However, given that it is well-established that suicidal people (who are not also homicidal) are frequently subject to extensive stigmatisation within their workplaces, their communities and sometimes even their own homes, I wondered whether the construction of suicide as necessarily including the killing of at least one ‘innocent’ person and suicidal violence as a spectrum along which suicidal feelings could grow to become homicidal could, albeit inadvertently, contribute to or compound existing stigmatisation. Indeed, even the use of the ‘innocent’ as an adjective to describe people who die by suicide seems to raise some important critical questions about the emotional responses and moral judgements that are invited of us as readers by the text. An important consideration I was therefore left with, is what is lost and what is gained in constructing suicide with the expansive potential proposed by Joiner. Within this consideration an essential perspective missing here for me was the voices of people with personal lived experience of suicide, which leads neatly to my final point. In concluding the book, Joiner describes himself as occupying a ‘sleeves-rolled-up’, yet compassionate, scientific approach (p. 175), drawing across theoretical and empirical scholarship and his own professional experience to construct this argument. At times, however, for me this attempt to construct a detached positionality appeared to amplify clinical authority (e.g., describing psychiatrist Eli Robbins' posthumous diagnosis of ‘mental disorder’ in people who have died by suicide by saying ‘if anyone knew a mental disorder when he saw one, it was Robins’ (pp. 39, 40)), whilst also dismissing or downplaying the perspectives of some critical social scientists, anti-psychiatry activists and people with personal lived experience of suicidal distress as overly emotionally invested. The gulf constructed in the book between the authoritative clinical voice and the overly emotional voices of lived experience or critical perspective appeared to me to reproduce some of the central concerns that have been levied at dominant voices within the field of suicide research and undermine the efforts that have been made across multiple health research areas to make space for and learn from experts by experience. Hazel Marzetti: writing–original draft preparation, writing–review and editing. Hazel Marzetti is funded by the Wellcome Trust [226934/Z/23/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. The author declares no conflicts of interest. The author has nothing to report.