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A blog about the Suicide Cultures research project

Category: Theorising suicide

What, suicide runs in families?

I hadn’t planned to focus my first published PhD article on our ‘not knowing’ about intergenerational suicide. I have analysis to share and haunted stories to tell. However, in my work as a PhD researcher (at the University of Edinburgh) and as a psychotherapist, I was encountering surprise from other therapists and suicide researchers: What, suicide runs in families? Our ‘not knowing’ puzzled me. And so, I realised I needed to start with an article that examined what’s happening in our ‘not knowing’. I’m excited to see it published, flying out into the world.

 

Examining our ‘not knowing’

I consider the ‘problem’ of intergenerational suicide to be embedded in sociocultural contexts. Contexts that shut down our knowing and enable intergenerational suicide to slip into silence and continue. What are the sociocultural complexities? In the article, I think with Gabriele Schwab’s take on intergenerational trauma theory. It’s a theory informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the cultural unconscious. I think it offers a useful lens through which to consider intergenerational suicide in families. I enjoy writing with Schwab’s theorising of intergenerational trauma as a language for thinking with the unconscious happenings in the story of (for illustrative purposes) one of my collaborators, Isabella.

Opening up space to think about and know intergenerational suicide differently.

 

The elephant in the room

As I move through the article, I find myself playfully writing-with-an-elephant-as-inquiry. An elephant called Nelly. She represents intergenerational suicide and the absent presences in the stories of my collaborators. In writing with her, I’m calling on a particular cultural phrase familiar within my British context – the ‘elephant in the room’. It means the presence of something not being spoken about, something invisible. In this instance, it’s the people who have died by suicide; it’s suicide running in families.

 

A social injustice

I am passionate about this. About examining what’s happening in our ‘not knowing’. This critical examination of what’s happening in our ‘not knowing’ offers opportunity to challenge the status quo of silence, shame and stigma. As opposed to unprocessed trauma remaining hidden within the unconscious. And hidden behind the closed doors of families and therapists’ consulting rooms. Until the next suicide happens.

 

Reading the article and beyond

And so, here it is, the full article: Stewart, K. R. 2024. What, suicide runs in families? Writing-as-inquiry to examine our ‘not knowing’ about intergenerational suicide. Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086241254813

 

Whilst I leave you to read the article, Nelly and I have analysis to do, ghosts to hunt and stories to tell. We’ll be back soon.

Socially compassionate responses to suicide: A contribution to the Time Space Compassion approach

The Suicide Cultures team was invited to present at the Scottish Government’s Time Space Compassion event in March. The Time Space Compassion approach “is about securing better outcomes for people experiencing suicidal crisis. It does this by focusing on people’s experience, human connection and relationships, offering a shared language, resources, and ways to connect and take action together”.

The event brought together people working with and affected by suicide to discuss and develop the approach.

In line with our focus on the social and cultural contexts in which suicide is embedded, I presented some reflections on the relationship between forms of social-political and cultural ‘crisis’, including austerity, the cost of living crisis, transphobia, and suicidal crisis. I asked what the use of the term ‘crisis’ might conceal, particularly in relation to how many people’s experiences of distress and suicidality are bound up with longstanding, slow and more ‘unspectacular’ forms of violence, including being slowly ground down by unfeeling or uncompassionate structures, day by day.

Drawing on the idea of “creating a radically different cultural landscape”, as highlighted in the Time Space Compassion report, my presentation focused on some examples from ongoing ethnography with a community-based organisation, which I have pseudonymised as In the Open. In the Open provides support for people with enduring mental health challenges, through what I argued is a socially compassionate approach.

This included examples of:

  •  forms of accompaniment offered by In the Open staff, though which they support people to access health and other forms of care
  • how In the Open operates as a space of inclusion and belonging for people who, for various reasons, are socially excluded and may even be positioned by other institutions and social structures as ‘burdensome’
  • how the long-term nature of the support that In the Open offers allows for the development of supportive, caring and trusting relationships between the members of the group, as well as with staff members

 

I also shared an example of the systematic denial of compassion to certain people, based on our analysis of the Fatal Accident and Sudden Deaths Inquiries (FAIs) of deaths by suicide that occur in Scottish prisons. My presentation reflected on how in these reports, many people who have died by suicide in prison are constructed as ‘difficult’, ‘non-compliant’ and ultimately ‘unhelpable’. I argued that many of these inquiries fail to engage with the broader uncompassionate environment of the prison and how this contributes to people’s distress and even death.

My presentation ended by asking people to think about and share examples of other socially compassionate or uncompassionate spaces and how these may be related to suicide or suicide prevention. This was taken up in smaller group discussions following my presentation.

Later in the day, I was in conversation with Haylis Smith, discussing the Time Space Compassion approach:

 

 

Suicide Cultures and ‘the edge’

In May 2023 I was delighted to be featured as the speaker for the ‘First Thursday Seminar Series’ organised by the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, in the School of Health in Social Science, at the University of Edinburgh.

This was a wonderful opportunity to share some thoughts, ideas and ongoing analyses from the pilot work that I did – along with Sarah Wright – for the Suicide Cultures project. We ran a series of arts-based workshops – testing out approaches to working with different community groups to have conversations about suicide, its meanings, and its effects. The audience was a broad mix of counselling and psychotherapy practitioners and researchers, as well other scholars of suicide, and the discussion afterwards was a welcome chance to hear how others connected with the findings, and our analysis of these.

The paper I gave for the seminar drew on some eclectic theoretical resources – Lauren Berlant’s ‘slow death’ and Avery Gordon’s ‘haunted’ sociological imagination – to think through some of the stories that were told about living with and experiencing suicidal distress in our workshops.

You can listen to the seminar here.

 

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

Reflecting on the release of ethnicity in ONS suicide reporting

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.

Migrant Suicide: summary of master’s dissertation

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.

Researching suicide in a global pandemic

In May this year I was supposed to be launching the full ‘Suicide Cultures’ project, which was awarded 5 years of funding by the Wellcome Trust. However, not long after the award was confirmed, the UK was hit by 3 weeks of industrial action, and during that time, the Covid-19 crisis rapidly developed. I returned to my office in Edinburgh on Tuesday 17th March, and that day all staff who could work from home were told to do so; all classes were paused that week; all subsequent classes were to be held online. I spent the afternoon setting my computer up to let me work remotely, threw as many books as I could carry into bags, and left.

There never seemed to be a good time to announce the good news about the grant; and as the situation with the pandemic continued to increase rapidly in seriousness and impact on lives and livelihoods, it became clear that the project itself would be significantly affected. In light of this, I shifted the start date – provisionally – to September 2020, to build in time to think, plan, reflect and prepare.

In this blog I wanted to start sketching out some of the different ways that the study of suicide, and in particular the Suicide Cultures project, might be shifted and shaped by the extraordinary circumstances we are currently living through.

 

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