Stengel, Cook and Kreeger's Attempted Suicide is the most sustained early attempt to draw out the social setting of an attempt at suicide. It is part of a real flourishing of social psychiatry in the UK and reinforces a productive model for collaboration between research psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers in the 1950s and 1960s. The sheer amount of work required for a robust social setting, charting the social repercussions for an attempt at suicide, is laid bare in this text.