The Discovering Liveability Project builds on work in two previous research projects (Suicide Cultures and Suicide In/As Politics). Our project is moving beyond and challenging the current dominant focus on the prevention of death at the point of crisis (Marzetti et al. 2022), towards exploring possibilities and potentialities for living. Our analysis will thus not be limited to suicide prevention policies but will also examine broader governmental policies and practices which invite uneven possibilities for living in the UK. Given high rates of suicide reported for some marginalised populations, such policies might include austerity, housing, immigration, and policing, to name a few. As part of this work, we are engaging with the burgeoning academic literature on ‘liveability’ and ‘lived experience’ and want to share some initial reflections on what we’ve learnt from two of our first reading groups. We read Banerjea and Browne’s ‘Liveable Lives’ (2023) and ‘The Politics of People with Lived Experience’ (2016) by Jijian Voronka (references below).

Situated in the contexts of Brighton in the UK, and Kolkata in India, Banerjea and Browne unsettle the ways in which the presence of progressive LGBTQ policy and legislation in the UK, creates the illusion of better lives for LGBTQ folk. As the authors highlight, the presence or absence of LGBTQ+ rights does not necessarily translate as a measure of un/liveability. Whilst we acknowledge that ‘progressive’ policies may only create an illusion of better lives, for our project, it is nevertheless important to move beyond the narrow focus on death prevention which currently dominates suicide prevention. Such a focus often fails to consider the broader policy landscape. Even though suicide prevention policies are seen as a measure of governmental interest in and commitment to addressing suicide, suicide prevention policies alone do not necessarily translate into sustaining liveability. We therefore need to consider how un/liveability is constituted at the intersections of other broader policy regimes. Such an approach highlights suicide prevention and un/liveability as an interdisciplinary and complicated endeavour.

However, following Banerjea and Browne, broadening our focus from suicide prevention policy alone, also necessitates recognising the limits of policy, the presence of which does not necessarily translate to liveability for all. Indeed, the existence of suicide prevention policy in the UK since 2002 can be read to suggest Britain’s progressiveness compared to other nations without suicide prevention policy. However, the globalising of Western mental illness and suicide knowledge has received much critique for furthering colonial control (Mills 2014) and disrupting other ways of knowing and responding to suicide/ality (Zantingh and Ansloos 2024). Indeed, the reading of Britain as developed vis-a-vis its commitment to prevent suicide, is tempered by the fact that suicide prevention prioritises a depoliticised reading of suicide (Button and Marsh 2020; Marzetti et al. 2022), and moreover that suicide prevention policies co-exist with policies (such as PREVENT and Hostile Environment) that actively invite and craft uneven living conditions for many (Mills 2018, 2020).

A key inspiration of the book is Banerjea and Browne’s articulation of how life is lived beyond (albeit always in relation to) rights and legislation, moving beyond deficit narratives of people living with the desire to die (Krebs 2023). In this vein, our project moves beyond the analysis of policy and parliamentary debates, to foreground lived experience to learn about what makes lives liveable, or not. As Banerjea and Browne highlight, resisting reproducing a homogenous and linear idea of what liveability is, restricts us from defining liveability, and Voronka’s work on the politics of lived experience research was helpful here. The inclusion of lived experience perspectives has the potential to disrupt hierarchical colonial power relations of researcher and researched. Nevertheless, “relying on ‘lived experience’ to produce research... risks further entrenching models of ‘difference as deficit’ and thus sanctioning the ongoing business of mental health systems” (Voronka 2016, 192). Given the dominant and pervasive medicalised understanding of suicide as mental illness (Marsh 2010), lived experience knowledge can be used to reproduce dominant knowledges on suicidality, rather than necessarily challenging them. With our focus not only on those who identify as having lived experience of suicidality, but also those more broadly affected by policies and politics of unliveability, we will be continuing to attend carefully to how we are conceptualising ‘lived experience’ knowledge, so that it doesn’t lose specificity and its radical potential for disruption.

• By Dr Emily Yue & Dr Alex Oaten

References

Banerjea, N., Browne, K. (2023). Liveable Lives: Living and Surviving LGBTQ Equalities in India and the UK. London,: Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350286818

Button, M. E., & Marsh, I. (2020). Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention. Routledge.

Krebs, E. (2023). Queering the Desire to Die: Access Intimacy as Worldmaking for Survival. Journal of Homosexuality, 70(1), 168-191. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2022.2103874

Marsh, I. (2010). Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Cambridge University Press.

Marzetti, H., Oaten, A., Chandler, A., & Jordan, A. (2022). Self-inflicted. Deliberate. Death-intentioned. A critical policy analysis of UK suicide prevention policies 2009-2019. Journal of Public Mental Health, 21(1), 4-14. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMH-09-2021-0113

Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The psychiatrization of the majority world (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203796757

Mills, C. (2018). ‘Dead people don’t claim’: A psychopolitical autopsy of UK austerity suicides. Critical Social Policy, 38(2), 302-322. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018317726263

Mills, C. (2020). Strengthening Borders and Toughening up on Welfare: Deaths by Suicide in the Uk’s Hostile Environment. In I. Marsh & M. Button (Eds.), Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention (pp. 71-86). Routledge.

Voronka, J. (2016). The Politics of ‘people with lived experience’ Experiential Authority and the Risks of Strategic Essentialism. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 23(3), 189-201. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2016.0017.

Zantingh, D., Hey, B., Ansloos, J. (2024). Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research. In: Dueck, A., Sundararajan, L. (eds) Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market. Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53196-5_6

Discovering Liveability still feels like a ‘new’ research project, but it builds on several years of research that different members of the team have been involved in. One of these is the Suicide Cultures: Reimagining Suicide Research project (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/suicide-cultures/suicide-cultures-seminars/). Since 2021, the Suicide Cultures project has hosted regular online seminars which have featured a wide range of scholars (academics, practitioners and activists) sharing their work on (or relating to) suicide. These seminars have provided a valuable space to talk, reflect and share different perspectives on suicide, informed by diverse disciplines and positions.

Between 2021 and 2024 the seminars were mainly organised by Suicide Cultures PhD student Emily Yue (who is now a postdoctoral researcher on Discovering Liveability – link). Emily worked with Asia Podgorska (admin assistant on both Suicide Cultures and Discovering Liveability) to schedule speakers, book times and dates, set up recordings and host Q&As. You can see a full list of the Suicide Cultures seminars here, including (in most cases) recordings of the seminars.

It’s hard to pick a favourite, as each seminar brings different perspectives and insights. However, some highlights for me include hearing Priti Sridhar and Saisha Manan from Mariwala Health Initiative, India, sharing about the different projects that they support, each of which challenges dominant narratives about suicide and who is ‘suicidal’. Another from 2022, was hearing Zoreh BayatRizi’s sociologically informed work on the history of knowledge about suicide.

Several of our seminars were given by colleagues who are now part of our project advisory board for Discovering Liveability, including Scott Fitzpatrick, and China Mills. One of our most popular seminars featured Jennifer White (Victoria University, and advisory group member on Discovering Liveability) and Discovering Liveability Co-Investigator Fiona Malpass in conversation, focusing on the issue of ethics in suicide research, drawing on the Critical Suicide Studies statement of ethics. This conversation was opened up to bring in other attendees, in a carefully held space. The seminar was a lovely example of what it is possible to achieve when the more usual presentation format is shifted to a more discursive and interactive one.

We are planning to launch a new seminar series that will be hosted by the Discovering Liveability project, building on some of the work we achieved through the Suicide Cultures seminars, but hosting perhaps different conversations about ‘liveability’ and ‘lived/living experiences’. In this, we will aim to experiment further with the online seminar format, and see what other kinds of conversations and engagements we might be able to make space for in the coming years.

In the meantime the Suicide Cultures seminars continue in 2025. On March 24^th we are hosting Kamesha Spates, who is pioneering sociological, qualitatively driven work with Black women on suicide – a group who continue to be neglected and overlooked in much suicide research. April 30^th will feature Lynn Tang sharing her work on protest suicides in Hong Kong – addressing important intersections between experiences of suicide and political contexts. Finally, our May seminar will be with Caroline Lenette, who is leading and nurturing a range of decolonial, creative approaches to working with and researching suicide – particularly with marginalised migrant groups and Indigenous communities in Australia (sign up for this seminar will be available soon, you can see a special issue of Social Sciences that Caroline is guest editing here).