This article maintains that it is important to understand how any given society views the act of suicide. It traces the forces that have shaped attitudes toward suicide in the Western world, documenting the change from viewing suicide as a sin to viewing it as a mental health problem. It also discusses recent methods of assessing attitudes toward suicide, including both normed and non-normed approaches. Finally, it calls for new types of research in the area of attitudes toward suicide that will permit finer-grained analyses of this most complex human behavior.
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