Reframing Suicide

This book focuses on understanding and researching suicide and suicide prevention from historical, political, cultural, social, and philosophical perspectives, all of which are located in particular contexts of research and practice. Critical suicide studies, as an intellectual movement, has been in the making for over 40 years. Yet it has emerged only in recent times thanks to the global efforts of scholars, practitioners and activists working across a range of disciplines and fields of practice. Critical suicide studies seeks to reframe how suicide has been researched by disrupting traditional ways of understanding suicide and suicide prevention. In so doing, this movement is critical of the universalising assumptions and applications of ideas about suicide, which too often are centre on Western notions of psychopathology, and individualised accounts of agency and suicidal subjectivity. The collected works in this book offer interventions into the way suicide and suicide prevention have been understood in different contexts, be it in relation to the history of knowledge production and its approaches, practices of suicide prevention, and more recent examples of how suicide is represented, both publicly and personally. This book will be of immense value to scholars, students and researchers interested in the topic of suicide in relation to epistemic injustice, history, critiques of scientific frameworks, moral discourses, ethics, and creative arts such as poetry. It was originally published as a special issue of Social Epistemology.

Katrina Jaworski is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. She researches the agency of suicide, with a focus on gender, sexuality, youth, ethics and poetry. Her publications include numerous academic articles and book chapters, and books such as The Gender of Suicide (2016). Ian Marsh is Reader and Suicide-Safer Universities project lead at Canterbury Christ Church University. His publications include Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth (2010), and he co-edited Critical Suicidology: Toward Creative Alternatives (2016) and Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention (2020).

Introduction: Knowledge Is Made for Cutting 1. Morality, Mental Illness and the Prevention of Suicide 2. The Social Production of Psychocentric Knowledge in Suicidology 3. Epistemic Justice and the Struggle for Critical Suicide Literacy 4. Subjective Connectivity: Rethinking Loneliness, Isolation and Belonging in Discourses of Minority Youth Suicide 5. At the Limits of Suicide: The Bad Timing of the Gift 6. Towards Ethics of Wonder and Generosity in Critical Suicidology