Suicide has been more a topic for speculation and conjecture than one for the kind of factual inspection this chapter will endeavour to direct to it. In doing so I am glad to follow Erwin Stengel’S important contribution to this subject; he wrote this chapter for the first edition of “Psychiatrie der Gegenwart” 1961. The scientific study of suicide has its origins in two distinct sources: developments in clinical psychiatry and in epidemiological sociology. Freud (1971) and other psychoanalysts, notably Menninger (1938), in describing the psychopathology of melancholia and suicide provided a theoretical basis for comprehending self-destructive behaviour. But I think it fair to add that, while Freud promoted the detailed analysis of the labyrinthian ways by which a person may come to wish his own destruction and that of others, he did not offer a form of therapy the psychiatrist could readily apply in his day to day encounters with the suicidal. Indeed it fell to the mental hospital psychiatrist to identify the clinical features of the suicidally prone and introduce the treatments that could erase an inclination to suicide—defining the manic-depressive group of disorders (Kraepelin, 1913), and the discovery of specific treatments for these conditions has been among the most significant clinical achievements in psychological medicine.