Abstract

Philosophical and literary approaches to suicide open valuable avenues of exploration into issues of freedom and meaning that are otherwise stifled by those in the mental health community before they can even be raised. This paper will present an overview of recent perspectives on suicide from the psychological and psychiatric communities and will then attempt to demonstrate their shortsightedness relative to literary and philosophical approaches which include those of Schiller, Kant, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Camus, and Sartre, among others. In the end, it will attempt to enrich the discussion of suicide not only for humanists, but for those in the psychological/psychiatric fields.