Suicide in/as Politics
The Suicide in/as Politics project is a partnership project between the University of Lincoln and the University of Edinburgh, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project aims to explore the politics of suicide and suicide prevention using an explicitly critical frame of analysis. In phase one of this research project the researchers, Dr Ana Jordan, Dr Alex Oaten, Dr Amy Chandler, and Dr Hazel Marzetti analysed the eight suicide prevention policies in use 2009-2019, the political debates that surround them, as well as charity documents during this time period in order to consider how suicide and suicide prevention are constructed within these spheres. In phase two of the project, the findings from phase one were shared through a series of arts-based workshops with members of the public (particularly people from communities disproportionately affected by suicide and the professionals that support them), to see what they made of our data.
We were delighted when the opportunity arose to run a knowledge exchange event with the Lincoln Policy Hub, to engage in a dialogue with policy makers about our findings. This was our first opportunity to share our research with a policy and practice focused audience, facilitating a two-way dialogue to strengthen our on-going analysis and dissemination. The event brought together people working in policy and implementation across a variety of statutory services and third sector organisations to share our early findings and to find out what they thought of them from the perspective of experts working in suicide prevention.
We began the day by providing an overview of our analysis, which has suggested that suicide prevention policies can be overly focussed on preventing deaths, paying less attention to why people do not wish to live in the first place. We also shared our findings about how particular communities, such as rural communities, people criminalised through the justice system and LGBTQ+ people were understood in policies, political debates and campaign documents. We argued that often the disproportionate burden of suicide within such communities was constructed in a way that made the socio-economic and political construction of risk invisible, instead focusing on more individualised understandings of suicidal distress.
If you would like to read more about this work, you can access our paper in the Journal of Public Mental Health, which provides an overview of our analysis of UK suicide prevention policies 2009-2019; whilst our paper in the Journal of Culture, Health and Sexuality explores the construction of LGBTQ+ suicide as either an internal psychological problem in need of clinical support or an external problem of stigmatisation, discrimination and victimisation perpetrated by bullies requiring anti-work; and finally our analysis of suicide prevention as a method of biopolitical surveillance has been published in the Journal of Critical Social Policy.
In the afternoon of the event, we shared an exhibition of some of our most recent work using creative writing and visual arts with community groups. This gave event attendees insights into participants’ views on the politics of suicide prevention and enabled them to discuss the artwork and how it related to their own work in suicide prevention. Attendees also tried out some of the creative methods of expression we used in our workshops, creating blackout poems and collages to add to our exhibition guest book.
Find Out More
The team have published a policy brief outlining some of our key findings on the Lincoln Policy Hub here and more blog posts are available on our website. If you would like more information about the research, please contact Ana Jordan (anaJordan@lincoln.ac.uk) or Alex Oaten (AOaten@lincoln.ac.uk) for Lincoln based enquiries or Amy Chandler (a.chandler@ed.ac.uk) or Hazel Marzetti (hazel.marzetti@ed.ac.uk) for Edinburgh based enquiries.