University of Missouri-Kansas City professor and author Clancy Martin writes that he has had an enduring suicidal compulsion.

In 2018, he published a Huffington Post essay, “I’m Still Here,” in which he detailed living with addiction and suicidal thoughts and recounted his several attempts to take his life. But he’s still here and willing and able to candidly explain the suicidal mindset – his own, at least – with a message to others who feel the same: They are not alone. Self-destruction, he says, is almost always avoidable.

Martin joins Angela Elam, former producer and host of public radio’s New Letters on the Air, in a discussion of his new book based on that essay, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind.

Martin also examines writings by and about others who’ve attempted suicide, how philosophers throughout time have addressed the subject, and what he has heard from readers, friends, and students about their struggles.