Psychotherapy of suicidal behaviour is most effective when it flows from understanding. Professor Edwin Shneidman has spent his working life clarifying this issue and making direct implications for intervention. Now, nearing the end of his career in suicidology, this book is a statement of his conclusions. The book touches upon various integral aspects of suicidology: its definitions, aphorisms, commonalities, typical scenarios, psychological core, psychotherapy and gambits for prevention. These concepts are illustrated by reference to Terman's study of gifted children, to a famous Italian writer, and to a dramatic court martial (of an alleged murder committed in a suicidal context). The key concept in this book is psycache: that is, suicide as caused by an intolerable ache in the psyche; an unacceptable pain in the mind. Further, the book rpeates how this intolerable pain is fuelled by thwarted psychological needs, for which that individual is willing to die. "Suicide as Psychache" is an informative and stimulating book. It should be a valuable read for anyone who wants to be thoughful about the problems of suicide and who wishes to go beyond the usual statistics and prescriptions that currently exist in the professional literature. There are also Shneidman's provovative aphorisms and maxims about suicide itself, for example, "never commit suicide when you feel self-destructive", "there are many pointless deaths but never a needless suicide", "all suicide is psychache - intolerable mental pain", "each suicide seems logical to the constricted mind that commits it", "the way to lower a person's suicidal lethality is to decrease that person's perturbation", and, "it is precisely the 'can'ts' and the 'won'ts' and the 'could'nts' and the 'have-to's' and 'always' and 'onlys' that are negotiable in psychotherapy". It is this kind of wit and wisdom that makes the book valuable and practical.