Alan Apter – författare

In an epoch when rates of death and illness among the young have steadily decreased in the face of medical progress, the persistently high rates of youth suicide and suicide attempts around the world remain a tragic irony and a challenge to both our clinical practice and theoretical understanding. How can these deaths be prevented? Can they be anticipated? Are there perceptible patterns of risk and vulnerability? What role do families, gender, culture, and biology play? What are the treatments for and outcomes of suicide attempters? To address these questions, experts from around the world in all areas of psychiatry, from epidemiology, neurobiology, genetics and psychotherapy, have brought together their current findings in Suicide in Children and Adolescents.

First published in 1990. This monograph series, published under the auspices of the Department of Psychiatry of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, is meant to keep track of important developments in the profession pf psychiatry, to summarize what has been achieved in particular fields, and to bring together the viewpoints obtained from disparate vantage points-in short, to capture some of the excitement ongoing in modern psychiatry, both in its clinical and experimental dimensions. Violence and suicidality have always been major public health issues, but it is only fairly recently that they have become the focus of some major clinical and biological research efforts. This is due partly to a large increase in suicide and homicide rates in the young and partly to a realization that effective management of psychiatric patients cannot be based on categorical diagnosis alone, but requires an understanding of the patient's entire behavioral profile. This volume attempts to describe some of the most important advances in the psychobiological understanding of the behavioral dimensions of suicide and violence that have been made over the last 10 years. It is comprised of papers presented at two symposia held under the auspices of the department of psychiatry of Albert Einstein College of Medicine that were devoted to the topics of violence and suicide.