Content note: suicide
Western society, at large, has become more accepting and empathetic towards neurodivergent people. Granted, whilst psychiatric diagnostics and treatments remain unfairly rigorous and dehumanising in many institutional contexts, the layperson now acknowledges and speaks about mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
Despite this, suicide and feelings of suicidality still remain a conversational taboo. Opening up about one’s experiences with depression and/or ADHD might be welcomed with a few sympathetic words or glances. On the other hand, talking about one’s suicidality is resolutely a social faux pas – more likely to get one sectioned and forced into oppressive systems of psychiatric coercion, than to invite compassionate understanding and dialogue from those around you.
Alexandre Baril coins the term ‘sucidism’ to describe the structural subjugation suicidal people undergo in their daily lives. The silencing of suicidal voices, the overlooking of suicidal people and the diminishment of the suicidal person’s bodily autonomy – these are forms of harm that have been normalised in our society in the name of life preservation. Suicidality signals that a person is not ‘sound of mind’: both their mind and body thus fall into the control of the state and its doctors and lawyers. The suicidal person’s decision-making capacities are ignored; their voice is not heard. Calling for suicidism to be acknowledged as a distinct form of oppression, Baril points to current suicide prevention strategies – like evaluating risk, contacting emergency services, and preventing suicide through coercive measures – as societally and psychically detrimental.
According to Baril, suicidism justifies itself through a ‘dominant suicidist preventionist script’ – the injunction to live and work that has been a mainstay in Western society. Suicide, in the early modern era, was perceived as a sinful act that betrayed Christian ethics. Those who took their own lives were forbidden for burial in Christian graveyards – a la Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – and otherwise societally silenced for voicing suicidal thoughts.
Today’s secular society continues in the tradition of this history of discrimination: the disapproval of the church has merely transformed into the disapproval of the medical industrial complex. Suicidality has now become a psychiatric pathology – an a priori symbol of mental unfitness. Any trace of suicidality then, divests the suicidal body-mind of its autonomy, handing its decision-making capacities over to psychiatric institutions and doctors. Moreover, Western capitalism, viewing people as labouring machines, understands suicide and suicidality as refusing the conversion of life into capital. Suicidal people thus become burdens and sources of shame in our societal imaginary – perceived as robbing the state of potential labour capacities.
This is especially disarming to people already marginalised, like queer, trans, disabled and/or Mad people. To people already facing racism, ableism and other forms of institutional subjugation – already so used to having their bodies stand for who they are – speaking about one’s suicidality is doubly risky. Even hinting at suicidal feelings or feelings of self-harm opens up their already-surveilled bodies to the further diagnostic penetration of psychiatric forces – forces that can restrain and section them at will, in line with the laws of many Western states.
Moreover, as Joshua Reeves notes, our society’s technological progress has only intensified this discrimination. Technocapitalism – hand-in-hand with surveilling psychiatric institutions – constructs online ‘suicide screens’ that regulate the ‘reproduction of life as well as the prevention of death’. One’s suicidal emotions and bodily rights are thus transformed into a field of political intervention. They become datafied and informatised numbers on screen – not living, breathing humans with emotions.
However, there seems to be light at the end of this tunnel. Scholars like Baril are importantly calling attention to the discrimination suicidal people face by giving it a name and asserting it as a legitimate societal problem. Personally, I call for the witnessing and listening to suicidality, from a place of care instead of a place of fear. As Jeffery Anloos and Jennifer White point out, a ‘zero-harm’ approach to suicide is a much more compassionate way of responding to suicidal feelings, than a ‘zero-suicide’ approach. We should view suicidal people not as bodies to regulate, but as just like us – ultimately, other people who deserve to be listened to reciprocally and understood. Suicide is a communal phenomenon and I believe the only way to value properly the interiority of suicidal persons is by seeing them not solely for their sufferings or unproductivity, but by pinpointing the largely structural causes for their suffering – and how these causes often intertwine with histories of capitalist domination and colonial violence.
Writing about suicide, Lisa Stevenson quotes a friend thus: ‘although I want to die, I am not suicidal. I do not belong to your calculations. I want at least to own my own death, and my pain’. As a society, we must remember each other’s personhood. It is our responsibility to care for others without resorting to harmful state and psychiatric tools to deal with their unwanted or excessive emotions. They deserve to be seen not as statistics or unproductive members of society, but as one of our own.
Imagining more equitable futures is the first step towards praxis. In imagining a future where suicidality is not a taboo, but one strain of emotion in the vast ocean of human experience, I look forward to a time ahead when our collective feelings are recognised for what they are: entangled and structurally-rooted, yes, yet still contestable through a mutual acting-otherwise.
About the author
Rivaa Ubrani is a poet, writer and researcher based in London. She recently completed an MA in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, where she researched madness, suicide and neurodiversity in Shakespearean tragedy. Her work is informed by Mad Studies and anti-psychiatry, with a particular interest in the history of suicide. She is currently working on a children’s book about rats, and writes a Substack blog.