Suicide and Evidence Seminar Series

Suicide research and prevention is generally driven by statistics, which in the UK and much of the West have historically reported (white cis) men as dying at the highest rates of suicide. In this seminar series, we rethink what constitutes as ‘evidence’ about suicide. We learn from folks researching suicide with populations who are often under-represented in or excluded from suicide statistics. In these cases, we are interested in how evidence on suicide is navigated and reimagined, and what this offers for suicide knowledge production and for people's lives. We also hear in this seminar series from people who are critiquing the statistical status quo of existing (often pathological, white male) evidence on suicide. What becomes possible when we think beyond trying to fit people into existing ways of measuring suicide and unliveability? Find out more about the project here.

The "body" as evidence in suicide: Whose meanings inhabit the "suicidal body"? 

marcela polanco

For therapists, our practices with people who we name as suicidal, often rely on the assumption that the huMan body functions as evidence--whether we focus on the divide mind-body or not, our practices are ultimately body-centric, in a manner of speaking. Modernity’s mental health, thus suicidology conceives the person as possessing a mind-body where proof of risk, pathology, or intent is located, positioning its biological conceptions of a 'body' as universal. In doing so, it generates a paradox: The same systems of meaning that construct the idea of the “suicidal body” are later confirmed by it. This conversation interrogates such paradox from a decolonial framework from Abya Yala, situating the body as a site for coloniality to open a pluriversality from where to imagine the re-existence of collective corporalities and alternative conceptions of living and dying that exceed modernity’s frameworks.