My book examines recent literature on suicide in Northern Ireland, Ireland, Great Britain and elsewhere, in the context of my life experience, my MSc/PhD university dissertations, and ongoing social discourse and public/political narratives about suicide prevention and assisted suicide. I question the validity of a necessary link between suicide and mental disorder, as defined by psychiatry. I contend that suicide represents a multidimensional, multifactorial reality, characterised by many complex factors: individual instability, social context and historical, political and cultural contingency. I argue that each lethal suicidal event is unique in its time, place, situation and circumstance, such that its preliminary actuality may remain largely unknown.