Re-imagining suicide prevention : Bringing lived experience to the front.

I have been reading ‘Who gets to be smart’ by Bri Lee and in it they pose:

Language and culture skew science. Researchers who aren’t careful with their words not only risk exacerbating a wide spectrum of prejudices, but they risk expanding or limiting the imagination of further researchers.

Throughout our history, people who live through periods of suicidal distress have not been taken seriously in research and in the community. Well, they are seriously thought of as mad, lost, crazy or “off the rails” but they haven’t been seriously thought of as a place to go for knowledge or expertise about suicide.

 Call this what you like but it is plain and simple discrimination, and it exists even in suicide prevention’s own backyard. In the suicide prevention sector, we like to think we are different, we understand. But the truth is we aren’t.

 Lani East, Kate Dorozenko and Robyn Martin from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, have looked at this exact issue[1]. They analysed a set of Australian suicide prevention documents that gave guidance to how to help someone who is feeling suicidal or how to support yourself if you are feeling suicidal. What they found is troubling:

 We found that risk and biomedical discourses dominated, with people experiencing suicide ideation constructed as dangerous, different, lacking coping skills, and burdensome.

 As someone who has experienced thoughts of suicide, these characteristics do not reflect who I am as a person, but they definitely reflect the external and internal stigma that I feel when I experience thoughts of suicide. These are the things that prevent me from getting help when I need it most.

 The authors of the documents identified in this study were noted as “experts”. They were Government Health Departments and well-known organisations who do work in suicide prevention. One of the problems that we are faced with, is that dominant conceptions of suicide, as they have persisted through time, are just that, dominant. We are missing many other voices within suicide prevention because of the way knowledge is generated in this space.

 A lot of what we know about suicide comes from years of peer-reviewed research on the topic. It is important to unpack this a little.

 Let’s start with “peer”. When we say peer, we are really saying psychiatrists, psychologists and academics. When we say research, we are tracking back the long history of scientific enquiry into suicide, primarily stemming from a medical and illness approach. What we know about suicide is privileged to these worldviews.

 Enter lived experience. This alternative form of knowledge comes from deeply knowing a topic through experience. We could say that the knowledge is experience-reviewed rather than peer-reviewed and that our research is an immersive experience into a phenomena. Subjective experience to form objective knowledge.

 Lived experience is moving to the front to stop this skewing process and to open wide the imagination of further researchers. Lived experience is standing up to say that people with suicide ideation are NOT dangerous or burdensome but yes we ARE different in incredible ways that are yet to be told. Lived experience is shaking the foundation of what we know about suicide and I am excited to learn of this new future we have working together to prevent suicide.

[1] Full article available here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31204901/