Suicide Cultures: Reimagining Suicide Research

by Joe Anderson

Here at the Suicide Cultures project we have been hard at work all over Scotland gathering data about people’s experiences of suicide. In our interviews, the events we have been attending, and in the notes we’ve been keeping about local areas, we have been privileged to hear profoundly moving stories about people’s struggles and their resilience in the face of huge challenges.

One of our aims with this work is to understand the contexts in which suicides happen. This means thinking beyond dominant ways that the medical field, psychologists, and many researchers construct suicide by thinking of it as a result of mental illness. We want to challenge the idea that contemplating and attempting suicide, as well as the grief that follows bereavement by suicide, is located only in the mind, instead proposing that there are many other dimensions of human life that are implicated in suicidality. This includes how suicide is embedded in the physical, social, emotional, and political geography of the areas we are working in to get a larger image of the complex ways that distress is generated within institutions, discourses, and systems.

Some of the people we have interviewed and spent time with have told us about difficulties with their mental health, while others have explained their suicide attempts as related to their need to escape abusive relationships, the ongoing fear produced by financial insecurity, as well as the negative emotions that accompany not fitting in or social and physical isolation.

Our desire to map and understand contexts that contribute towards suicide has led us to propose the concept of Suicidescapes. In the rest of this blog, we outline why this concept is useful for understanding suicide in Scotland and crucially, how it helps us think differently than work that sees suicide as a problem to be solved only with individual responses like talking therapy and pharmaceutical medication. Excitingly, this new way of thinking has the potential to generate interventions that acknowledge how suicide is bound up with many different scales of human experience, from the individual and familial, to larger communities and cultures.

Why Suicidescapes?

After spending time with literature from the field of Geographies of Death, we came across the concept of ‘Deathscapes’ – an idea that acknowledges that death has both a physical association with particular spaces, like cemeteries and memorials, and a social-emotional life that extends beyond them. For example, death is present for the mother of a child who has died far beyond the physical space of their burial. A photo on a mantelpiece may evoke their presence, an activity that used to be shared may provoke waves of emotion, while the story that people tell of someone’s life and death takes on a larger social meaning when it is shared among a community.

We recognise that suicide is a particular kind of death, often marked by silences and a sense of taboo. As one participant in our research said, when someone dies of old age or from an illness it is tragic, but when someone dies by suicide you have to deal with complex emotions that reflect the uncertain nature of why someone would take their life and whether more could have been done for them. There is also the silence and taboo that often accompanies suicide more generally in our society that can make a loved one feel isolated or misunderstood. This separates these deaths out as particularly challenging for families and communities who have to grapple with the uncertainties left behind. We felt that Deathscapes could be extended to help us understand why suicide seems to carry such fraught moral weight within private and public spheres.

The concept of Suicidescapes allows us to account for the ways that suicide occurs in local areas as it becomes associated with physical landscapes (in other words, where it happens), the emotions of the people involved (how it feels when someone dies by suicide), and the stories that are told and shared among the people or communities affected (how suicide is constructed and explained). By thinking of these three levels as connected yet distinct, real yet imagined, we want to emphasize that knowledge about suicide is never free of the moral judgments that abound in its wake. The way we think about suicide affects how it appears and is responded to.

So, if this concept is supposed to help us understand the contexts in which suicides happen, what does a Suicidescape actually look like?

What is a Suicidescape?

Let’s use a bounded example that we are working with in our project – suicide in the context of prisons. Prison is a unique Suicidescape that elicits suicide at higher rates than in the general population of Scotland. While we could say that suicide in prison occurs because of mental illness or other individual risk factors like drug and alcohol use or specific life trauma, Suicidescapes asks us to look at the ways that the physical, social, administrative, and emotional logics of prison life play a role in creating conditions that invite suicidality.

First of all, prison is designed primarily as a space of punishment, where shame, exclusion, and dehumanisation are enacted on people who have broken or are accused of breaking particular laws of the state. The stigma that accompanies being incarcerated or even having been in prison in the past is clear to see. The social mark of prison can make an individual feel they are different than others. Secondly, even when prisons aim to improve the mental health of their residents, they tend to implement policies that further the punitive logics of incarceration. People who express suicidal thoughts are closely monitored, even woken multiple times throughout the night to ensure they have not attempted suicide. In some cases, prisoners are strip searched for sharp objects, placed in special anti-suicide clothing, and isolated alone in a cell so they can be more closely monitored. It is easy to see why each of these interventions may further compound someone’s suicidal distress.

Suicide is constructed by the prison as an issue of tighter regulation and control, rather than care and compassion, therefore justifying punitive measures. In this example, our concept has illuminated that the way suicide is constructed as a problem within institutions or cultures relates to the larger societal function of that institution. This case study demonstrates how we are conceptualising the spaces we work within across Scotland. Each unique area encompasses a variety of landscapes, institutions, social norms, cultural practices, discourses, and types of population that make up its particular Suicidescape, although it is never fully bounded and is in relationship with larger national and global Suicidescapes.

For more information about how we are representing these spaces have a look at our audio-visual poster in a previous blog post.

How does this help us understand suicide?

This concept is helping us to understand and imagine suicide in new ways. It avoids reducing suicide to individual risk factors, like mental illness, and instead embeds the issue in the wider social and cultural networks, as well as the physical landscapes in which it takes place. At the same time, our work allows each individual we engage with to define their experience using their own words. This is giving us data about the reality of the emotions that accompany experiences with suicide as well as allowing people to speak about suicide in ways that goes beyond the mental illness model.

This approach also helps us to hold tensions and disagreements about suicide without seeing these as necessarily contradictory. When professionals in suicide prevention organisations and the medical profession, service users, and people with experience of suicide disagree it offers us an opportunity to understand where our models of suicide are going wrong. It also allows us to see how frustration and anger about seemingly unrelated factors such as the current cost of living crisis, the inability to access services for drug users, or reductions in funding for public transport links in deprived rural areas might be related to someone’s expressed desire to die. This concept pushes us to see inequality as an active ingredient that produces harm in Scotland and around the world, including increasing suicidality.

Finally, Suicidescapes gives us a practical way to map suicide cultures in our study. By focusing on the physical environments in which suicide happens, its accompanying emotions and social interactions, as well as discourses about suicide we can see how deaths are produced by and become part of the cultures in which they occur.

Nov 7, 2022

Mapping Suicidescapes: A Socio-cultural, Geographic, and Politically Engaged Approach to Suicide

By Sarah Huque

On 24th October 2022

In Events, Theorising suicide

This is the Suicide Cultures research team’s audio-visual poster, originally presented at the Critical Suicide Studies Symposium, 21-22 October 2022.

SuicideCultures_CSS 2022 Poster

Oct 24, 2022

Working through the ethics of ‘Suicide Cultures’: Part II – The ethics of anonymization

By Rebecca Helman

On 31st August 2022

In Ethics

In this post we continue with a discussion of some of the ethical challenges we are encountering as part of the Suicide Cultures project. Here we will focus specifically on the ethical challenges of working with the Fatal Accident and Sudden Deaths Inquiries (FAIs) of people who have died by suicide in prison. This post is intended as an explicit and transparent reflection on the complexities of issues of anonymization and an ongoing thinking project about issues of care, privacy and critiques of institutional framings of suicide. The reflections we present here have been born out of many discussions within the Suicide Cultures research team, as well as consultation with Sarah Armstrong, Linda Allan and Betsy Barkas, who are also working with FAIs.

As part of the Suicide Cultures project we are conducting an analysis of all the FAIs of deaths in prison due to suicide in Scotland from 2016 until the present. Prisons have been identified as having high rates of suicide (Tomczak, 2018; Zhong et al., 2021). Scottish prisons record higher rates than those in England and Wales, although there are a number of issues which make comparisons problematic (Armstrong & McGhee, 2019). Given that prisons are significant sites of suicide, it is important to explore how suicide is understood and responded to within these contexts. Our analysis focuses on how suicide is constructed within FAIs and the implications of these constructions for understanding the role of the prison environment in deaths by suicide.

When we say ‘how suicide is constructed’, we mean that the ways in which suicide is talked about and portrayed creates particular social ‘truths’ about suicide. These include ‘truths’ about what causes suicide and how it should be responded to. These ‘truths’ come to be taken for granted and regarded as the only explanation for suicide. For example, one of the dominant ways in which suicide is often constructed in research, as well as public policy, is as an individual mental health problem (see Marsh, 2020). This is done through explaining suicide as being caused by mental illness such as depression and proposing that the best way to prevent suicide is through individual therapeutic and pharmacological interventions. These constructions tend to focus solely on the ‘suicidal’ individual, neglecting the broader context in which the individual lives. In contrast, research which focuses on the social contexts in which people live highlights “the heart-rendering suffering, daily indignities, and desolation many people struggle with” (Reynolds, 2016, p.169), including poverty, homophobia, racism and other forms of social exclusion and violence (White, 2017). This kind of work constructs suicide as an issue of social justice rather than an individual mental health issue and proposes that suicide can only be ‘prevented’ by making lives more liveable for all people. It is important to note that these social constructions of suicide are not static and that they change and shift over time[1]. In our analysis we are interested in the kinds of truths about suicide that are presented in the FAIs.

An FAI is an inquiry, conducted by a sheriff, the purpose of which is to “(a) establish the circumstances of the death, and (b) consider what steps (if any) might be taken to prevent other deaths in similar circumstances”. An FAI is carried out for certain kinds of deaths, including when the death occurs while a person is in legal custody. As one sheriff noted in their report “The primary purpose of a fatal accident inquiry (‘FAI’) is to give a public airing of the facts surrounding a death or fatal accident. This affords those with a direct interest, such as the family of the deceased, the chance to hear first-hand from witnesses and learn the full circumstances of the death as they are known”.

These reports are publicly available, to facilitate transparency and public accountability, and include full names and many other personal details of the person who has died, and in some instances of their family, partners and friends. In light of the public nature of these reports, the issue of anonymization to protect people’s privacy is complicated. Normally in qualitative research, we pseudonymise participants – changing people’s names, and sometimes key details, in order to protect their privacy. This allows people to participate in a research project without necessarily exposing personal details about themselves. However, as Betsy Barkas noted in our discussion about working with FAIs, people’s anonymity has already been violated by the state in the case of FAIs, making it difficult for researchers to preserve people’s privacy.

As a research team we have found ourselves asking: how we can present a critical analysis of the FAIs, which explores the often-problematic ways in which people who have died by suicide are constructed, while preserving, as far as possible, the dignity of those who have died, as well as their loved ones who have been affected by their deaths?

We feel that a critical analysis, which draws directly on quotes from the FAIs, is important to be able to both highlight and disrupt the decontextualized ways in which prison suicides are understood, as well as the ways in which the systems and environment of the prison are implicated in people’s deaths. We have all been deeply moved, distressed and angered by what we have read in the FAIs and we hope to be able to draw on some of these feelings in our writing, to communicate in more affective ways about the people who have died by suicide in prison. We recognise that each person who has died by suicide is a human being, deserving of dignity and respect, whose life cannot and should not be reduced to the details of their deaths as recounted in the FAI. We aim to make this point clear in our writing about the FAIs, as well as, as far as possible, not to reproduce harmful constructions of those who have died. We hope that through presenting a critical analysis of the institutional frameworks through which suicide is presented, we can challenge dehumanising representations of people who have died by suicide.

We also recognise that our analysis of the FAIs, which includes potentially recognisable information about the person who has died, may be distressing for their loved ones. We have, therefore, decided not to use people’s real names. We will be using pseudonyms for all participants, as well as removing or altering demographic information in order to reduce, as far as possible, identifying information. However, as we have highlighted above, the publicly available nature of the FAIs mean we cannot guarantee that people will not be identifiable.

It was mentioned in our discussion with Linda Allan, Betsy Barkas and Sarah Armstrong that some families may want their loved ones explicitly named, as this may be an important way of honouring them and the conditions under which they died. It is possible that some of the families of the people represented in the FAIs we are analysing may feel similarly. However, after long deliberation we have decided not to reach out to families. The FAI process is, more often than not, very drawn out and so many of the deaths we will be analysing occurred many years ago. We recognise that some families may find it intrusive to be contacted by researchers after so many years and that they may not wish to revisit the death of their loved one in this way. This is in line with our original ethics application, where we proposed that we would not contact the families. After having seen the reviews, it has also become clear that in many instances the families are not named and therefore finding and contacting them would itself be intrusive and something we feel is ethically questionable.

There are no easy ethical answers when it comes to doing research on suicide, which becomes even more complicated when working with publicly available data collected by the state. The institutional environment of the prison removes certain rights from prisoners, while the FAIs construct their lives backwards through their final act of suicide. In our work we want to take care to avoid creating further suffering for the families of those who have died by treating the subjects of FAIs as whole human beings caught within complex institutional, legal, social, and economic forms of oppression. We hope that by more explicitly articulating our own ethical position, we make ourselves more ethically accountable as we continue this difficult work.

References:

Armstrong, S., & McGhee, J. (2019). Mental health and wellbeing of young people in custody: Evidence review. The Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research. https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/publication/mental-health-and-wellbeing-of-young-people-in-custody-evidence-review/

Marsh, I. (2020). Suicide and social justice: Discourse, politics and experience. In M. E. Button & I. Marsh (Eds.), Suicide and social justice: New perspectives of the politics of suicide and suicide prevention. Routledge.

Reynolds, V. (2016). Hate kills: A social justice response to “suicide”. In J. White, I. Marsh, M. Kral, &. J. Morris (Eds.), Critical suicidology: Towards creative alternatives. University of British Columbia Press.

Tomczak, P. (2018). Prison suicide: What happens afterward? Bristol, Bristol University Press.

White J. (2017). What can critical suicidology do? Death Studies, 41(8), 472–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2017.1332901

Zhong, S., Senior, M., Yu, R., Perry, A., Hawton, K., Shaw, J., and Fazel, S. (2021). Risk factors for suicide in prisons: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet Public Health, 2020(6), e164-74.

[1] For example, in many contexts suicide was historically regarded as a criminal act. In contemporary societies this ‘truth’ has been replaced by the ‘truth’ that suicide is caused by mental illness.

“Prison cell” by decade_null is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Aug 31, 2022

Interrupting the conversation: Inserting social inequality into a discussion about suicide

By Rebecca Helman

On 18th May 2022

In Events

In this post I reflect on an instance of interrupting a discussion about suicide. I explore how asking different questions about the relationship between suicide and social inequality allows for different kinds of engagements with suicide. These kind of interruptions are simultaneously challenging, uncomfortable and necessary.

On the 17^th of March, my colleague Sarah Huque and I attended an online roundtable discussion hosted by the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) entitled Suicide in South Africa: An Intersectional Dialogue. I was looking forward to the discussion, both as a researcher who works on suicide and as a research psychologist who previously trained and worked in South Africa.

I was particularly looking forward to the ‘intersectional’ focus of the discussion. The roundtable brought together the Operations Director of the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG); a mental health journalist who had lost her son to suicide; a psychiatrist; and a journalist who has survived “suicidal ideation/experimentation” (their words). The panel was attended by nearly 250 people, from across South Africa.

However, I was disappointed to discover that the discussion was dominated by a narrow, individualised, medicalised understanding of suicide. Someone repeated the phrase “the most dangerous kind of depression is an unmedicated one” and the psychiatrist proclaimed that “90% of those who die by suicide have a mental illness”[1]. The panelist from SADAG mentioned that since the beginning of the COVID pandemic they were experiencing a dramatic increase in calls to their crisis hotline but in the panel discussion there was no connection made between this increase and the particular social realities of South Africa, which has often been described as “the most unequal country in the world”. For me this was a clear and problematic missed opportunity to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has intersected with existing social inequalities to make lives unliveable for millions of people in South Africa. This was but one example of the failure to engage with issues of inequality during the discussion.

By the end of the session I was feeling extremely frustrated and angry. In conversation with my colleagues in the Suicide Cultures project the next day, we reflected on how these kinds of discussions perpetuate decontextualised understandings of suicide. Spurred on by my colleagues’ shared concerns, I decided to write to the organisers of the event and express my disappointment. In my email I explained how I was especially disappointed by the lack of reflection on and engagement with the structural conditions which produce distress, in light of South Africa’s various intersecting legacies of inequality. I also noted that I felt PsySSA, as the representative body of psychologists in South Africa, had a responsibility to promote more holistic, ethical and contextually-relevant understandings of suicide rather than merely perpetuating individualised, psychiatric ones. I felt slightly better having, at least, articulated my frustration in this way but I did not have high hopes of a constructive response.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a response a few days later acknowledging my concerns and inviting me to participate in a follow-up question and answer session. I was invited, during this session, to share my reflections on the initial discussion and to pose some questions to the panellists. I was both pleased and daunted at this opportunity to interrupt the discussion about suicide, especially as someone who is not a clinical professional. But I also felt a sense of responsibility to insert issues of inequality into the discussion of suicide, so I accepted the invitation.

I began my reflection by noting that the initial session had focused predominantly on identifying “signs” that people may be suicidal; promoting medication as the most effective treatment of suicidal distress; as well as suggesting that people who are experiencing suicidal distress can be protected using (coercive) forms of surveillance. I reflected on how these kinds of discussions are part of dominant ways of thinking about suicide, not only in South Africa but across the globe. I noted that it was important to expand understandings of suicide beyond these narrow focuses in order to more meaningfully contextualise people’s distress. Informed by many of the discussions we have had as the Suicide Cultures research team, as well as engagement with work of others in critical suicidology, I then posed the following questions:

How can we talk about ‘mental health’ and suicide in South Africa without centring issues of inequality and justice? By this I do not mean merely mentioning ‘social determinants of health’ or how some people’s distress may be caused by a lack of sense of safety in their communities, but rather what would it mean to reframe suicide as a social and political issue that is produced by social injustice, which demands social and political rather than merely individual responses?
What would it mean to shift from thinking about suicide as a mental health problem caused by depression to thinking about it as an expected and reasonable response to socioeconomic disadvantage or other kinds of social exclusion?
How do medicalised understandings of suicide and distress normalise social contexts which make life unliveable for many people?
How can we develop psychopolitical approaches which make connections between social inequality, injustice, and the emotional impact this has on people?
How can we shift from individual to collective efforts to repair ongoing social injustices?

Unfortunately, two of the previous panellists were unable to join the question and answer session due to load-shedding[2]. However, it seemed the questions I posed spoke to many of the challenges that South African psychologists and counsellors were facing, with many of them sharing their frustration about the difficulties of supporting people struggling with distress. There was also much discussion about inequalities in terms of being able to access mental health care, particularly for people living in rural areas. In this way, the critical interruption that I posed appeared to open up ways to talk differently about suicide. This was an important reminder of the power of interrupting normative conversations about suicide and how these interruptions can reframe suicide in relation to issues of social inequality. This is part of the work that we as the Suicide Cultures research team are doing through a variety of channels, including our seminar series, podcast and this blog.

[1] For reflections on the problematic nature of these kinds of statistics see Examining the Claim that 80–90% of Suicide Cases Had Depression – PMC (nih.gov).

[2] Load-shedding refers to scheduled rolling blackouts due to an insufficient supply of electricity, which is a relatively frequent occurrence in South Africa.

The image included here is “Unequal Scenes – Durban, South Africa” by Global Landscapes Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

May 18, 2022

Working through the ethics of ‘Suicide Cultures’: Part I – In Good Faith

By Sarah Huque

On 9th March 2022

In Ethics

This post is the first in a new series on the Suicide Cultures blog, exploring the ethics of the project. We will periodically post new pieces discussing ethical challenges we encounter, discussions we have, and actions we take to try to find solutions.

The idea of moving discussions of complex ethical issues into actions came up during our most recent Suicide Cultures seminar, led by Fiona Malpass and Jennifer White. That presentation invited participants to discuss the Critical Suicide Studies ethics statement, and at the end, the facilitators asked us to think about what actions we would take as a result of the rich and challenging discussion during the session. [Keep an eye out for the recording/summary coming to the Seminar Series section of this blog soon.] To respect the privacy of participants, we will not discuss the details of the seminar in depth here – though many of the issues raised are similar to those raised within the Suicide Cultures team, which we will discuss throughout this ethics blog series.

The ethics application: Ethics 101

For all researchers working with people, an institutional ethics application is one of the fundamental actions we must take. In this first ethics blog post, we review some of the ethical challenges the Suicide Cultures team faces – discussing both the process of putting together our actual ethics application as well as some of the ‘less tangible’ ethical conundrums with which we struggle. We used the process of writing the ethics application as a starting point in moving our theoretical ethical questioning into the realm of the practical, as we prepare for fieldwork to commence this year. The process of engaging in what can feel like a bureaucratic ‘box-ticking’ exercise can be an action that jump-starts more complexity in thinking about ethics than the form may allow – if we engage with ethics as an on-going process, in good faith. For further reading, and a recent example of deep reflection on, challenging of, and expansion of thinking around the ethical considerations of suicide research, see Jaworski (2022).

There are plenty of scathing indictments of institutional ethics procedures, and for good reason. We will touch on some of these negatives but want to focus on the positives that can arise from engaging with institutional ethics – and the ways in which researchers can help their institutions evolve by putting more, and more in-depth thought, into their ethics applications. Here are some of the ways in which we tried to push the bounds of our ethics application.

One of the challenges can be when bureaucracy seeks to ‘protect’ ‘vulnerable’ participants in ways which provide legal cover but little real support. This tension can present in many ways, for example in researchers jumping through hoops to provide standardised procedures and token protections that do not allow for the development of individualised safety plans for participants. For the Suicide Cultures project, we contended with this challenge by creating a standard format for developing safety plans with participants, with some general resources populated, but also leaving space for one-to-one discussions of support needs with participants. By including this in our ethics application, we hope to build upon the idea of what protection means – and introduce agency and self-determination into the development of safety plans. This issue can also manifest in a tension between agency and protection – for example, we as researchers may be required to inform authorities if we believe a participant is intending to harm themselves in the immediate future. We stated this requirement clearly on our participant information sheets, in order to be up front with the constraints on researchers as professionals, which in turn can constrain participants’ agency. We hope this will enable participants to choose what they share with us carefully.

We are also working with a range of creative methodologies – which come with their own challenges, not least of which is the additional scrutiny applied to non-traditional methods. Part of ensuring we can justify the use and value of these methods involved exploring the lessons learned from those already using these methods; we read about photo voice, mapping, walking interviews (as well as interviewing in general and ethnography/participant observation) in-depth, discussed what we found, and explored legal and copyright rules and health-and-safety concerns. We continued this action by hosting a small internal seminar on all of these methods – to share this learning and discuss the implications of these methods – in a similar manner to the ethics seminar discussed in the introduction. These are small, early-stage actions that can help us to engage in research in as ethical a way as we can – and to continue the conversations beyond the forms.

Continuously engaging with ethics is important, because one of the major challenges we faced in trying to translate some of our ethical concerns into concrete actions for the research project was doing this with all of the uncertainties that accompany research planning. Realistically, we cannot predict every challenging situation that will arise across the lifetime of the project – especially since at the moment in-person versus digital is still a major question as Covid-19 continues to disrupt our ‘usual’ ways of doing research.

Institutional ethics is important in that it compels researchers to think about accountability and protection. It can also jump start more complex thought processes around ethics; we are challenged to think ahead and to think about ALL of the people who may be involved/impacted. For example, in a previous ethics application we submitted, for a review of Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) reports of deaths by suicide in prison, we had to consider the impact of our document review on (for example) the families of the person who has died, witnesses in the inquiry, and the sheriff who wrote the report. We also continue to grapple with the use of reports about a person who cannot consent or contribute to the process. [We plan to dedicate a separate post in this series to the ethics of these FAI reviews, and to issues around the use of information about and creation of subjectivity around someone who has died.]

Ethics beyond the application: The struggle to do no harm – and to try to do good

During a recent Suicide Cultures team meeting, we discussed the newsletter that we send to our mailing list with updates about the project. This discussion naturally segued into a conversation about how much to reveal, how identifiable areas we work in might be from different outputs we have/will produce, and the discomfort of writing about other people. We did not come up with any ‘good’ answers, but we agreed that having these discussions was a positive sign – and that engaging with ethics in research is an ongoing process that must be undertaken to the best of our abilities. We are trying to work in good faith – knowing that there is no such thing as perfectly ‘ethical’ research. Following this discussion, we took the action of dedicating a session of our monthly meeting series on emotions to think through the discomfort that comes along with trying to do research in an ethical manner – and how we can use, engage with, and sit with that discomfort.

To conclude this introductory post in our ethics series, we made a list of some of the concerns we continue to grapple with – engaging in discussions and imagining ways to translate these discussions into actions. We will explore some of these topics in future posts in this series – for now, we leave you with only (a limited list of) questions:

The tension between agency and protection (revisited).
- How do we engage communities?
- How do we incorporate feedback into our work?
- How do we navigate the line between agency/self-determination and qualitative analysis?
Moving online: ethics of research during Covid-19.
- Ensuring safety;
- Following rules;
- The impact of the digital divide.
How do we relate to ethics ourselves?
- In what ways are we implicated in systems (e.g. through analysis of FAI reports)?
- To what extent do we have the right to do this research? Why do we do it (anyway)?
How can we keep engaging in actions to do ethical research in good faith?

References

Jaworski, K. (2022). The ethics of facing the Other in suicide. Health, 26(1), pp. 47-65.

Mar 9, 2022

February 2022 Newsletter

By achandle

On 10th February 2022

In Uncategorised

The February 2022 newsletter for the Suicide Cultures project is now available, featuring updates from the project.

Suicide Cultures Newsletter 3 Feb 2022_final

Feb 10, 2022

Staying Alive: risk, resistance and responses to LGBT+ youth suicide in Scotland

By Hazel Marzetti

On 17th November 2021

In Events

Do you want to learn more about LGBT+ youth suicide? Are you keen to think about practical strategies for prevention? Do you want to meet others who are interested in doing similar work? Come along to our event on the 24th November 4-6pm to find out more!

Nov 17, 2021

What does it mean to investigate suicide cultures?

By Joe Anderson

On 7th September 2021

In Culture

As a project defined around the central aim of investigating “suicide cultures” in Scotland, we thought it might be a good idea to start talking about what we mean when we say we want to understand cultures of suicide. Culture is a concept that has been used to understand the ways that people live around the world. It brings out the nuanced nature of human connections and will be a useful tool in trying to decode the complexity behind why someone would take their own life.

The Evolution and Diffusion of Culture

Culture has been one of the most controversial concepts in the history of anthropology. Just as quantum physicists debate the nature and properties of particles, so anthropologists debate culture. The first theorists of culture in anthropology were firmly allied with European colonial power. The prominence of scientific racism in the 19th century opened the door to a hierarchical view of culture that saw different races on different stages of linear development that could be tied to characteristics such as skull size, social organisation, and “primitive Vs civilized” cultural practices (Chakrabarty 2007; Bridges 2011). Culture had a direction, said early anthropologists, who took for granted that European white culture was the most desirable and highest expression of human life, a form of organisation that all other societies would eventually arrive at.

Sep 7, 2021

A path is worn through a field of grass and heather leading up to a small evergreen tree.

Exploring grief, positionality, and landscape through film: Reflections and questions inspired by the documentary ‘Evelyn’

By Sarah Huque

On 30th August 2021

In Suicide bereavement

While exploring creative methodologies for approaching and understanding suicide, I came across a documentary film called ‘Evelyn’^[1]. The documentary follows the filmmaker, Orlando von Einsiedel, and his family as they spend five weeks walking in various scenic locations across the UK and talking about their brother, the eponymous Evelyn, who died by suicide 13 years prior.

The feature-length film provides a glimpse into one way in which art and landscape are used to work through grief, as well as raising questions about the experience of grieving a loved one who has died by suicide. How stories of suicide are built in art can indicate to what extent loved ones reflect common societal conceptualisations of suicide – arguably one way in which culture can impact on individual life stories. However, there is also room to demonstrate how families may ‘move beyond’ accepted narratives – for example, in public grieving and its impact in dispelling stigmas around suicide.

The director, as a professional filmmaker – the artist – and subject of the film, used his changeable roles in the project as a way at first to avoid talking about his own emotions to his family. This was raised by other participants and slowly worked through during the film, leading von Einsiedel to open up a bit more about his grief. This is interesting, as it indicates that while the assumption is that making art can be cathartic, it may also provide spaces to ‘hide’ from feelings. (Which is not necessarily negative but is an important point to note if the intention of arts-based working is therapeutic.) The filmmaker’s desire to hide, in part due to his position as the eldest brother and perception of his need to be strong for his siblings, also highlights that the loved ones of an individual who has died by suicide will experience their bereavement through the prism of their own positionality.

The film moves between different perspectives, highlighting how different experiences of grief (and engagement with the film-making project) may reflect a particular person’s social position – ultimately impacting the stories they tell. It also focuses on conversations between people who knew Evelyn – engaging in a process of building narratives about a loved one, which may evolve in the telling and in the adding from other perspectives. Importantly, some family members’ memories and experiences contradict one another, leading to moments of conflict in the film. The film attempts to share with the viewer a sense of who Evelyn was as a person. For me though, this also raises caution around interpreting these stories as ‘truths’ about him – Evelyn is no longer able to affect how his loved ones interpret his life, embodiment, and story. To the film’s credit, leaving some conflict in the film underlines the subjectivity of ‘knowing’ a person through our relationship(s) with them.

Absence-presence, landscape, and grieving through place

The film involves a great deal of movement and a sense of attachment to place. The family members retrace walks they had done with Evelyn and revisit the memories both stored and unlocked in place. Landscape – places of memory and importance to the individual – offers an interesting suggestion for a methodology that enables bereaved family members to engage with places that were important to them and their deceased loved one, and that impacted their relationships. Research methods that can embrace this place-centredness and mobility may ‘unlock’ different perspectives, expand understandings of a person through connecting with places special to them, and embed memories in materiality. (See for example the work of Maddrell^[2] in exploring absence-presence and place in grieving.)

While they walk, the family members begin to open up to strangers they meet who ask what they are doing – spurred to curiosity by the presence of the filming equipment. Throughout the course of the film, we watch the family members become increasingly comfortable with talking about Evelyn and suicide with those outside of their group. The story of the film shows viewers this process of emerging from an idea of suicide as a stigmatised, shameful topic that is not spoken about, and how the film, as an expression of mourning and healing, moves across the spectrum of the public-private. The film depicts interactions with other people who have lost individuals to suicide, clearly making an argument for the universality of this type of grief and expressing an opinion about the power of talking about it through the positive reactions from others with whom they engage. In this way, the film ultimately finds its thesis point, that silence about suicide is harmful, both within a public and a private context.

The film seems to present this point as somewhat deviant and/or revelatory, which is an interesting perspective given the prevalence of ‘talking about it’ as a major aspect of suicide prevention narratives and strategies. As a piece of art that reflects, creates, and comments on culture, the film’s sense of its own deviance draws together the various themes of the piece and raises questions about suicide culture(s) in the UK, outside of a policymaking/prevention/research setting. The film’s deviant mood may be a reflection of the filmmaker himself, and the evolution of his own ability and desire to talk about Evelyn’s suicide as the film progresses. Through his journey, the viewer understands how difficult it can be to actually practice ‘talking’ about suicide – and the ways in which this may be tied into ideals of stoic masculinity in the director’s need to take care of his siblings. This take on the filmmaker’s identity also reflects the focus on masculinity and emotional expression in research on men’s suicide – though less often on men’s grief. (For an example of work that has focused on men’s grief, see Creighton et al.^[3]) At the same time, this journey reflects change over time, and a change to the way the filmmaker but also broader society has approached suicide over the past thirteen years, suggesting momentum and improvement – a cultural shift, perhaps – around talking about suicide.

The sense of deviance at the end of the film also draws on the spaces in which we feel we can talk about suicide. Part of the film’s actual deviant action may be that the travellers spoke about suicide somewhat randomly, with strangers, in open, beautiful spaces – and with less hesitation as the film progresses. This in itself does feel somewhat deviant and reminds me of my (on-going) journey in being open to telling people that I research suicide when they ask what I do. As a culture, we are increasingly in agreement that we should talk about suicide, but there may still be barriers to where, when, and how we feel it is appropriate to have these conversations; should we only talk about suicide in proscribed mental health, death, and suicide-related spaces? The film says no, portraying these conversations as powerful, insightful, and relatable. It suggests a continuation of the emerging changes to talking about suicide the more people are willing to open up and within a greater variety of spaces.

[1] Evelyn (2018). https://www.evelynmovie.com.

[2] Maddrell, A. (2013). Living with the deceased: absence, presence and absence-presence. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), pp. 501-522

[3] Creighton, G., Oliffe, J.L., Butterwick, S. and Saewyc, E. (2013). After the death of a friend: young men’s grief and masculine identities. Social Science & Medicine, 84, pp. 35-43.

Aug 30, 2021

Reflecting on the release of ethnicity in ONS suicide reporting

By Emily Yue

On 23rd August 2021

In Theorising suicide

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has recently published suicide data by ethnicity in England and Wales (not Scotland) by comparing 2012-2019 death registrations and self-reported ethnicity from the 2011 Census (ONS 2021). Having previously reported only age and gender, this development casts a new light on the UK’s “male suicide crisis” for middle aged and young men (see Samaritans 2012; CALM 2019).

I have argued elsewhere that in light of the UK’s recent and historic immigration practice and policy which produces Britishness as synonymous with whiteness, that the paucity of ethnicity in suicide reporting and thus the prevention campaigns such statistics generate, translates to the male suicide crisis being a crisis for white men (Yue 2021b forthcoming). Like Cohen, Katona and Bhugra (2020), I have called for intersectional suicide reporting which includes ethnicity, in order to better reflect the reality of British people.

Aug 23, 2021

A blog about the Suicide Cultures research project

Suicidescapes; how we are mapping the cultures and contexts in which suicide occurs

Mapping Suicidescapes: A Socio-cultural, Geographic, and Politically Engaged Approach to Suicide

Working through the ethics of ‘Suicide Cultures’: Part II – The ethics of anonymization

Working through the ethics of ‘Suicide Cultures’: Part I – In Good Faith

February 2022 Newsletter

Staying Alive: risk, resistance and responses to LGBT+ youth suicide in Scotland

What does it mean to investigate suicide cultures?

Exploring grief, positionality, and landscape through film: Reflections and questions inspired by the documentary ‘Evelyn’

Reflecting on the release of ethnicity in ONS suicide reporting

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