The aim of this book is to provide evidence to inform the development and implementation of suicide prevention globally. It covers a range of topics that are relevant from local to national levels. It has an unapologetic emphasis on social determinants of suicide and a global perspective, with utility across the world as a primary resource by practitioners and policymakers. It aims at accessibility, with an emphasis on what can be achieved given the current knowledge base.

A central message of this book is the importance of using rigorous evidence to guide suicide prevention, whilst recognising that the best evidence is always partial. Key research is cited in the text and readers are, in places, directed to public-domain digital resources. The book aims to have relevance in low- and middle-income countries, as well as in high-income countries. It is not a country-by-country international overview.

Robert Schumann’s health issues have prompted sustained debates amongst physicians, historians, and musicologists. Proposed etiologies for his decline span bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, neurosyphilis, vascular disease, alcoholism, and personality disorders. Because his final years were spent in a psychiatric asylum, a retroactive narrative of inexorable decline has too often prevailed. Yet this reading reduces a richly textured life into pathology, overlooking Schumann’s literary imagination, resilience in the face of numerous personal losses, and unwavering devotion to music that persisted – often flourished – despite illness. This chapter discusses the diagnostic spectrum and its historiographical contexts from Richarz’s nineteenth-century ‘overwork exhaustion’ to Möbius’s dementia praecox, through contemporary arguments for bipolar disorder with psychotic features and tertiary neurosyphilis. It shows how shifting medical paradigms and cultural frameworks shape our understanding of genius, suffering, and the enduring interplay between creativity and illness.

The introductory chapter introduces the contemporary challenge of immigration from a psychological perspective. The focus is on how host society members and immigrants feel about and perceive the situation. In the twenty-first century, at least some host society members in Western and non-Western countries perceive immigration as a threat. This perceived threat can be economic (e.g., they are coming here and taking our jobs) and/or cultural (e.g., they are not adapting to our way of life and language, but continuing to live in their own ways). Central to the controversy of immigration is national identity, and the threat of immigrants against “who we are.” The plan of the book and the major psychological themes underlying immigration are described.

This contribution retells the familiar story of the international tax regime from an unconventional perspective, revealing how racial fears have burdened communities around the globe. It explores the impact of anti-Black racism on the international tax regime, tracing the evolution of international tax rules that have impoverished vulnerable states and eviscerated social safety nets in wealthier ones. Decolonisation granted political power and economic autonomy to erstwhile possessions only to watch it be stripped away by treaties designed to constrain fiscal sovereignty.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.

Globally, there exists no legitimate international tax policy-making institution. This has perpetually led to inequalities and deepening economic disparities in the current international tax governance system. This chapter argues that African countries should use the spirit of cooperation that the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) encapsulates to make difficult decisions about African tax governance. Since international tax governance is at a critical stage where it is uncertain that the status quo can continue, it is important for African countries to seize this opportunity to create a regional governance structure that could bring more fairness and justice to the international tax system as a whole. This chapter proposes that African countries through the African Union form their own international tax governance structure which would bring together existing regional economic communities (RECs) and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) to create an international tax forum that would address specifically African concerns. Moreover, such a structure would give African countries the critical mass needed to rebalance the unequal power relations in international tax while also offering benefits to the African people.

One of the conversion stories related to Augustine in the run-up to his own conversion was that of the philosopher and orator Marius Victorinus, who had translated the “books of the Platonists” that Augustine encountered in Book 7. What he does not tell us, however, is how important Victorinus was, not only as an exemplar of boldness in confessing Christ, but in shaping Augustine’s own reading of Plotinus. This chapter compellingly lays out Victorinus’ influence on Augustine’s Trinitarian theology as expressed in a brief and bewildering passage in Book 13. It shows that wherever Augustine departs from Plotinus, he does so in a way that he found in Victorinus; Victorinus also taught Augustine distinctions and arguments from Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics that he could not have known from other Latin texts available to him. Through Augustine, then, Victorinus had a much larger influence on the history of metaphysics than has been appreciated up to now. Moreover, we find that “Augustine’s common designation as ‘Platonist’ would be more precise if it were revised to ‘Victorine Neoplatonist.’”