Kinds of People Who Commit Suicide (Essay Sample)

Suicide
Student’s Name
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Suicide
Kinds of People Who Commit Suicide
According to the late American clinical psychologist and suicidologist, Edwin Shneidman, there are four characterizations of people who seek suicide. The first category of suicide seekers, according to the psychologist, is death seekers. Shneidman (1999) goes further to explain that individuals who fall under this category are those with a particular intent to end their lives. Inherently such people mean to eliminate their lives during their attempt at suicide. It is a commonplace for such individuals to attempt ending their lives on impulse as their determination to go through with the act only lasts for a short while.
Moreover, death seekers may hesitate and become ambivalent about suicide for a substantial period (Shneidman, 1999). Nonetheless, when death seekers achieve the desire to kill themselves, they take measures that guarantee their deaths. Often these categories of suicide seekers will opt for direct and violent methods of ending their lives, for example, through shooting, stabbing, or hanging.
The next category of suicide seekers is the death initiators. According to Shneidman (1999), these are those individuals who have an intention to end their lives since they believe that death is already underway. Often, death initiators believe that their demise is imminent, and thus instead of waiting, they opt to speed up the process. Most death initiators think that they have less than a week or a day before their imminent death, hence their resolve to speed up the process (Shneidman, 1999). Typically, people suffering from terminal diseases or the elderly make up this category of suicide seekers, and the most common method of death include drug overdose for the elderly and the absconding of treatment for the terminally ill.