Betty Yung – författare

The rate of suicides is at its highest level in nearly 30 years. Suicide notes have long been thought to be valuable resources for understanding suicide motivation, but up to now the small sample sizes available have made an in-depth analysis difficult. Explaining Suicide: Patterns, Motivations, and What Notes Reveal represents a large-scale analysis of suicide motivation across multiple ages during the same time period. This was made possible via a unique dataset of all suicide notes collected by the coroner's office in southwestern Ohio 2000-2009.

Based on an analysis of this dataset, the book identifies top motivations for suicide, how these differ between note writers and non-note writers, and what this can tell us about better suicide prevention. The book reveals the extent to which suicide is motivated by interpersonal violence, substance abuse, physical pain, grief, feelings of failure, and mental illness. Additionally, it discusses other risk factors, what differentiates suicide attempters from suicide completers, and lastly what might serve as protective factors toward resilience.

This book examines the “ethics in relation to city and urbanism” by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East–West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance.

This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating political theory, ethics, urban studies, public policy, making applications of ethics and political philosophy to social sciences to examine controversial urban issues in the Hong Kong context.  It challenges the general conception that philosophy and ethics are detached from everyday life, with the philosophers engaging mainly in abstract intellectual pursuit and some of them even disdaining “pedestrian” applications of abstract thinking. This book makesapplications of ethics and political philosophy to real-life urban contexts in Hong Kong, thereby trying to highlight the normative in order to throw new light to the general approach and strategy to deal with practical urban issues, facilitating “out-of-the-box” thinking in the field of housing and urban studies, stimulating scholars, researchers, and students in the fields, urban planners, urban managers, and other professionals as well as urban policy-makers.