Norman Farberow - Overview

Overview

Farberow rates as the most significant impacts work to be the lessening of the taboos related to suicide, so that the cry for help could be both more readily voiced and more easily heard. While preparing items for inclusion in the bibliography of his first book, The Cry for Help, Farberow noted an average of thirty-five suicide-related journal items per year over a sixty-year period, from 1897 through 1957. With the opening of the LASPC and the continual documentation of its progress, the long-neglected status of suicide as a significant public, physical, and mental health problem began to change. When Farberow collected citations for a second bibliography nine years later, the number had surged to roughly one hundred per year. The awareness created by Farberow, Shneidman, and Litman stimulated a growth in publications on all aspects of suicide.

The conundrum of suicide maintained its challenge. Farberow examined the shifting nature of risk within a variety of subgroups, including police officers, gay men, the obese, schizophrenics and other psychiatric patients. youth, adolescents, the aged, and the chronically and terminally ill. He evaluated and developed scales for assessing suicide risk in various levels of public schools and universities; offered recommendations to doctors, nurses, and hospitals; assisted in addressing the problems of the coroner and the bereaved; provided expert witness testimony for numerous trials; and consulted with both professional and Hollywood filmmakers. His work broadened to include crisis intervention with the publication of guidelines for human service and child health care workers in large-scale natural disasters.

Throughout his career, Farberow was prolific in publishing his observations, research findings, and clinical insights. He wrote 16 books, 50 chapters, 93 articles, three monographs, four manuals, three brochures, 13 book reviews, six forewords, three Veterans Administration Medical Bulletins, and one module. His books and articles have been translated into Japanese, Finnish, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, and Korean. He edited, contributed to, and consulted with many periodicals over the years and remains active with six.