My father died by suicide when I was seven and for my Masters Dissertation I explored his death in relation to the UK’s mainstream suicide discourse(s) which foregrounded male suicide as a crisis of masculinity.
I had never thought of my father as a migrant before, because although he looked Chinese he was born and raised in Liverpool. However as part of a course led by Alyosxa Tudor I was introduced to the differentiation of migratism from racism which situates Europe in its Postcolonial relationship with migration (Tudor 2017). This unsettled my father’s narrative. His suicide had ‘made sense’ before, slotting perfectly into the NHS’s suicide journey: his death certificate inscribed ‘he took his own life whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed’; the NHS (2019) say clinical depression – the leading mental illness ending in suicide – is often triggered by stressful or upsetting life events, including “bereavement, divorce, redundancy and job or money worries” and might lead to suicide when a ‘downward spiral’ of events accumulates.
