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.

This practical guide provides a holistic, wellness-oriented approach to understanding suicide and working effectively with clients who are suicidal. John and Rita Sommers-Flanagans’ culturally sensitive, seven-dimension model offers new ways to collaboratively integrate solution-focused and strengths-based strategies into clinical interactions and treatment planning with children, adolescents, and adults. Each chapter contains diverse case studies and key practitioner guidance points to deepen learning in addition to a wellness practice intervention to elevate mood. Personal and professional self-care and emotional preparation techniques are emphasized, as are ethical issues, counselor competencies, and clinically nuanced skill building. *Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com. *To purchase print copies, please visit the ACA website *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected].

When should we try to prevent suicide? Should it be facilitated for some people, in some circumstances? For the last forty years, law and policy on suicide have followed two separate and distinct tracks: laws aimed at preventing suicide and, increasingly, laws aimed at facilitating it. In Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws legal scholar Susan Stefan argues that these laws co-exist because they are based on two radically disparate conceptions of the would-be suicide. This is the first book that unifies policies and laws, including constitutional law, criminal law, malpractice law, and civil commitment law, toward people who want to end their lives. Based on the author's expert understanding of mental health and legal systems, analysis of related national and international laws and policy, and surveys and interviews with more than 300 suicide-attempt survivors, doctors, lawyers, and mental health professionals, Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws exposes the counterproductive nature of current policies and laws about suicide. Stefan proposes and defends specific reforms, including increased protection of mental health professionals from liability, increased protection of suicidal people from coercive interventions, reframing medical involvement in assisted suicide, and focusing on approaches to suicidal people that help them rather than assuming suicidality is always a symptom of mental illness. Stefan compares policies and laws in different states in the U.S. and examines the policies and laws of other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including the 2015 legalization of assisted suicide in Canada. The book includes model statutes, seven in-depth studies of people whose cases presented profound ethical, legal, and policy dilemmas, and over a thousand cases interpreting rights and responsibilities relating to suicide, especially in the area of psychiatric malpractice.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. It is all too easy to begin the introduction of a book examining suicide by citing statistics on rates of death around the world. The vast majority of research seeks to make sense of suicide through quantitative analysis; however, this does not begin to do justice to the lived experience. While we do not wish to suggest there is one ‘right’ lens through which to study suicide, we must recognize that there are myriad lenses though which to examine it. There are many voices, many stories that must be heeded, and these stories are not just of the people who have themselves died by suicide, but also those who are or have been suicidal and those who have been bereaved by suicide. By examining cultural perspectives, different media, memory and place, as well as loss, this book aims to tell stories of suicide and working and living with the suicidal.

This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, at the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’, whereby increasing numbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to kill themselves. The book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. It aims to consider what the extreme and subjective act of self-killing, narrated in suicide letters, can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood bodies. What do rising work-related suicides reveal about conditions of human labour in the twenty-first century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire for suicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their act? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to a finance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the French workplace.

Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a new comparative angle to understanding suicide beyond mainstream Western bio-medical and classical sociological conceptions of the act as an individual or social pathology is opened up. The book explores a number of ontological assumptions about the role of free will, power, good and evil, personhood, and intentionality in both popular and expert explanations of suicide. Suicide and Agency offers a substantial and ground-breaking contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of suicide. It will appeal to a range of scholars and students, including those in anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, suicidology, and social studies of death and dying.

This book provides insight and instruction for bereaved readers and those who work with them.