Edwin S. Shneidman

Edwin S. Shneidman (May 13, 1918 – May 15, 2009) was an American clinical psychologist, suicidologist and thanatologist. Together with Norman Farberow and Robert Litman, in 1958, he founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, where the men were instrumental in researching suicide and developing a crisis center and treatments to prevent deaths.

In 1968, Shneidman founded the American Association of Suicidology and the principal United States journal for suicide studies, Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior. In 1970, he became Professor of Thanatology at the University of California, where he taught for decades. He published 20 books on suicide and its prevention.

Shneidman was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1918 to Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a merchant with a department store. As a child, Shneidman attended local public schools.

He went to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for undergraduate and graduate work, earning a master's degree in psychology in 1940. His education was interrupted by World War II, and he served in the Army.

Afterward, Shneidman returned to graduate school, earning a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Southern California (USC). As an intern, he studied schizophrenia, then thought to be environmentally caused, at the Veterans Administration hospital in Brentwood|. He was an atheist.

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