Suicide (History)

Demonic geography is an approach to practicing human geography that operates from the premise that there are no such immaterial entities as 'souls', 'spirits', 'minds', integrated, stable 'selves', or conscious 'free will'. This paper elaborates the theoretical framework of demonic geography by spelling out how it is different from non-representational theory and by articulating it with recent developments in experimental psychology, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind. Counterintuitively, the paper shows that the deflationary, materialistic ontology of human nature espoused by demonic geography need not lead to meaninglessness, unhappiness, or the collapse of moral behaviour. Instead, subscribing to demonic geography opens up new ways to find meaning, to pursue happiness, and to live the good life.

Suicide is the ultimate outcome of poor psychological well-being;however, there is a paucity of research examining the link between occupation and suicide, despite early academic interest and the known importance of work to our everyday lives. We propose that this body of research was abandoned prematurely, and we provide a reanalysis by integrating the Job Characteristics Model and the Conservation of Resources  model  with  extant  suicide  research.  Specifically,  we hypothesize that work design characteristics (job autonomy, task variety, physical demands) and threats to personal resources (absence of viewing work-as-career, work-family conflict, family-work conflict,job dissatisfaction) are linked to suicide attempts via depression and suicidal ideation. Utilizing three measurement occasions and 2,855participants from the AddHealth database, our findings indicate that job autonomy, task variety, work-family conflict, family-work conflict,and job dissatisfaction all indirectly contribute to employees’ suicide attempts  via  depression  and  suicidal  ideation.  Thus,  negative employee perceptions of the workplace environment have much more severe consequences than is typically examined. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for developing a theoretically derived nomological net around suicidal behavior in an organizational context, and offer strategies for managers and employees to construct a work environment that is conducive to employee well-being.

RÉSUMÉ • Malgré des appels répétés dans les campagnes de prévention du suicide pour que les personnes suicidaires s’expriment, plusieurs ne se sentent pas en sécurité de le faire. Puisque briser le silence est capital pour prévenir les suicides, la peur de parler est contreproductive. Comment expliquer ces silences? La thèse défendue est qu’en dépit d’une laïcisation, d’une décriminalisation et même d’une certaine dépathologisation du suicide, les personnes suicidaires, leurs gestes et leurs discours demeurent inintelligibles en fonction d’une injonction à la vie et à la futurité. Des mécanismes sont en place pour culpabiliser, surveiller/punir et pathologiser les personnes suicidaires, les empêchant de parler. Je soutiens l’idée que l’injonction à la vie et à la futurité est promue par l’ensemble des discours actuels sur le suicide. Qu’il s’agisse de l’approche médicale, sociale ou biopsychosociale, les divers modèles sur le suicide aboutissent tous à la même conclusion: le suicide n’est jamais une option. Dans leur condamnation univoque du suicide, ces modèles n’écoutent les personnes suicidaires que dans une logique de surveillance, créant des espaces peu sécuritaires pour s’exprimer. M’inspirant des théories crip et des études du handicap qui critiquent le modèle médical et social du handicap et développent d’autres modèles, je propose l’adoption d’un modèle sociosubjectif du handicap pour interpréter le suicide. ///

MOTS CLÉS • Suicide, études critiques du handicap, santé mentale, oppression des personnes suicidaires (suicidisme), injonction à vivre. ///

ENGLISH
Can the suicidal speak ? Theorizing suicidist oppression through a socio-subjective model of disability

ABSTRACT • Despite repeated calls in suicide prevention campaigns for suicidal people to express themselves, many do not feel safe to do so. Because breaking the silence is crucial in preventing suicides, fear of speaking is counterproductive. How can we explain these silences? The thesis herein states that, despite the secularization, decriminalization, and even depathologization of suicide, injunctions to live and to futurity render suicidal people, their acts, and their discourse unintelligible. Mechanisms are in place to blame, control/punish, and pathologize suicidal people, preventing them from speaking. I support the notion that the injunctions to live and to futurity are promoted by the totality of current discourse on suicide. Whether using a medical, social, or biopsychosocial model, these various approaches to suicide arrive at the same conclu- sion: suicide is never an option. In their unequivocal condemnation of suicide, these approaches only listen to suicidal people’s voices through a logic of surveillance, creating spaces that are unsafe for expression. Inspired by crip theories and disability studies, which critique the medical and social models of disability and develop other models, I recommend adopting a socio-subjective model of disability to interpret suicide. ///

KEYWORDS • Suicide, critical disability studies, mental health, suicidal people’s oppres- sion (suicidism), injunction to live. ///

Référence: Baril, A. (2018). «Les personnes suicidaires peuvent-elles
parler ? Théoriser l’oppression suicidiste à partir d’un modèle sociosubjectif du handicap», Criminologie, 51(2), 189–212. https://doi.org/10.7202/1054240ar

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

RÉFÉRENCE:
Baril, A. (2020). « “Fix Society. Please.” Suicidalité trans et modèles d’interprétation du suicide : repenser le suicide à partir des voix des personnes suicidaires », Revue Frontières, 31, 2. En ligne : https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/fr/2020-v31-n2-fr05380/1070339ar/

Résumé
Alors que les modèles médical et biopsychosocial du suicide ont fait l’objet de critiques, le modèle social adopté dans les études/mouvements trans n’est pas remis en question à partir de perspectives anti-oppressions. Ainsi, les limites de ce modèle sont sous-théorisées. La question au coeur de cet essai est : quelles sont les limites du modèle social sous-tendant les analyses de la suicidalité trans? Basé sur une analyse critique des discours des travaux des autrices et auteurs qui ont adopté le modèle social, le présent article démontre que les discours sur la suicidalité trans au sein des études/mouvements trans reproduisent des formes de stigmatisation, de marginalisation et de pathologisation des personnes (trans) suicidaires. Je défends la thèse selon laquelle le modèle social produit une violence épistémique qui relève du capacitisme mental (ou sanisme) et du suicidisme (oppression des personnes suicidaires) en délégitimant les voix des personnes suicidaires.

Mots-clés : personnes trans, suicidalité, modèles d’interprétation du suicide, stigmatisation, sanisme, suicidisme
Abstract
While the medical and biopsychosocial models of suicide have been critiqued, the social model adopted in trans studies/movements has not been examined from anti-oppressive perspectives. Thus, the limits of this model are under-theorized. The question at the heart of this article is: What are the limits of the social model that underlies most trans suicidality analyses? Based on a critical discourse analysis of publications in trans studies/movements adopting the social model of suicide, this paper demonstrates that these discourses reproduce forms of stigmatization, marginalization and pathologization of (trans) suicidal people. I argue that the social model produces an epistemic violence founded in mental ableism (or sanism) and suicidism (oppression of suicidal people) by delegitimizing the voices of suicidal people.

Keywords: trans people, suicidality, models of understanding suicide, stigmatization, sanism, suicidism

CATO'S SUICIDE IN PLUTARCH CATO'S SUICIDE IN PLUTARCH* 68.1-5: … having embraced and taken farewell of his son and each of his friends more affectionately than he used to, Cato retired to his room; again his intentions seemed suspicious. Once inside his room he lay down and took in his hands one of Plato's dialogues, On the Soul.

In June 2016, the Canadian government passed Bill C-14 on medical assistance in dying, allowing for medically assisted suicide when ‘death has become reasonably foreseeable.’ While available for ill or physically disabled people at the end-of-life, medically assisted suicide is denied in cases where people are perceived to have a mental disability and whose suffering is strictly emotional/psychological, like suicidal people. I argue that this results in constructing two classes of suicidal subjects by considering physically disabled or ill people as legitimate subjects who should receive assistance in dying and suicidal people as illegitimate subjects who must be kept alive through what I call the ‘injunction to live’ and ‘somatechnologies of life’. Analysing discourses on suicide targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) people in LGBTQ scholarship, I argue that, based on the silencing of suicidal subjects through the injunction to live, suicidal people constitute an oppressed group whose claims remain unintelligible within society, law, medical/psychiatric systems and LGBTQ scholarship. This essay calls for listening to suicidal people’s voices and developing an accountable response to their suffering and claims.

Keywords: Suicide; Medically assisted suicide; LGBTQ scholarship; Ableism/Sanism; Injunction to live; Stigmatisation


Baril, Alexandre (2017). “The Somatechnologies of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law: LGBTQ Discourses on Suicide and the Injunction to Live,” Special Issue: Sexuality in Canada, Somatechnics, 7 (2): 201-217.

How can we best understand what suicide and suicide prevention are now? By this I mean, how can we think about the ways we have come to conceptualize suicide, the assumptions we make about what it is, what should be done, and by whom? I do not think these are idle, abstract, academic questions, for the truths constructed in language about suicide (in defining what it is, and its causes and solutions, for example) produce many material effects in terms of national and international policies, research priorities and funding, and prevention practices. More subtly, a whole field of experience is formed in relation to authoritative knowledge of suicide -for suicidal people, attempt survivors, and their families and friends, as well as professionals involved in prevention and research.

Based on judicial sources and records of anatomical institutes from 17th- and 18th-century Germany, Austria and Sweden, this chapter provides a fresh perspective on the criminal corpse in the context of historical suicide studies. Analysing a wide range of punishment practices in cases of suicide within their social contexts, the study focuses primarily on the dragging of the corpses by hangmen and the bodies’ transfer to anatomical institutes. By discussing the use of suicide corpses in different settings Kästner and Luef show that the suicide corpse was indeed an 'ill-treated body'. Nevertheless, enduring practices of both punishing and utilizing the suicide corpse served several specific purposes, ranging from a desired general deterrence to a contribution to medical progress and thus to the common weal.

… what different forms of rationality present as their necessary condition one can perfectly well do the history of, and recover the network of contingencies from which it has emerged; which does not mean however that these forms of rationality were irrational; it means that they rest on a base of human practice and of human history and since these things have been made, they can, provided one knows how they were made, be unmade.' 1

In this paper I compare the suicide theories advanced by two 19th century thinkers, Masaryk and Durkheim, and test their conclusions using data from an East European country, Romania, before and after the 1989 fall of communism. Using data from various sources (Censuses, vital statistical publications, European databases), I follow two main directions in my discussion: a) differences and similarities between the two theories of suicide and b) what can still be used from these theories to explain the suicide as a social phenomenon.

Key words: suicide, Masaryk, Durkheim, Eastern Europe, minorities"""

La mort yolontaire ct auto-administrée, le suicide, est une notion qui couvre tellement de réalités différentes que nous devons nous habituer à l'apprivoiser. Elle peut concerner des situations tragiques ct infiniment destructives, mais clle peut se référer aussi à des moments de paix et de libération. Elle ressemble en ,da à une autre notion typlquemt:llt humaine ct à potentiel très divers, l'amour. L'amour ,'est tantôt une source de sens dans la vic de quelqu'un, tantôt une addiction ravageuse, et encore: parfois son absence ou l'incapacité de le ressentir rendent la vic dépourvue de sens. Oc toute évidence, la plupart des suicides sont un signe de détresse, la manifestation d 'u n mal insupportable que l'entourage de la personne et la personne elle-même ont é<:houé à contenir. Ce n'est toutefois pas la seule vision de la fin de vie auto-infligée que l'on doit avoir, la tradition philosophique et littéraire montre bien d'autres pÎstes interprétatives, Le suicide marque, trivialement, la fin d'une vie, mais ne se fait pas nécessaÎrement dans le contexte de la « fin de vie ..-il peut en constituer une interruption très prématurée, La notion même de« fin de vie >1 perd d ans ce contexte son caractère évident : il ne peut plus s'agi r d'un moment facilement identifiable par les sciences natu relles. L'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé note que près de 800 000 personnes meurent chaque année du suicide, et il faudrait multiplier ce chiffre pour avoir une idée approximative des tentatives du suicide. C'est la troisième cause de décès chez les 15-19 ans, 1 Cd artide a béntfK:it d<,s convers,nions innnies IVe<: Yael Lavi de l'Université de Tel Aviv, avec Sha; uvl de l'Institut Van Lecr il Jér usalem, et d'une lecture attentive de 5;J.r.rh CUVIllo de l'unh,<,uité de Fr.rnche-Comté. l Maitre de conférences en phtlosophie morale, philosoph ie politique ct phLio$Ophlc du droit, univtrslh' de Lorrline, '" ". En;'u" anthropologique. d" wicide médi<:8lisé '" Enjeu •• nthropologiques du suicide mêdicalisé

This article explores Canadian reporting on suicide and the ways it changed over 150 years. Archival research on the reporting practices of two long-standing newspapers presented here shows that suicide was not always taboo in the media. In fact, the silencing and tiptoeing around reporting on suicide only began in the mid-twentieth century. Early newspaper accounts frequently included reports on suicides, both local and far removed, in­ cluding details on the exact manner of death. As public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to considering it an aspect of psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any mean­ ingful way for decades. RESUMfi Cet article explore les reportages canadiens sur le suicide et la maniere dont ils ont change depuis 150 ans. Une recherche dans les archives sur les pratiques de deux journaux longuement etablis montre que le suicide n'a pas toujours ete tabou dans les medias. En effet, la circonspection et le silence entourant le suicide aujourd'hui ne remontent qu'au milieu du vingtieme siecle. Les reportages anterieurs mentionnaient souvent les suicides, tant locaux qu'etrangers, et donnaient des precisions sur comment la personae est morte. Les reportages cependant ont subi I'influence de changements dans la perception du public et la loi envers le suicide. Dans le passe, on considerait que cet acte etait un crime; par la suite, on I' a envisage comme le symptdme d'un trouble psychiatrique. Des lors que le suicide est devenu un sujet intouchable dans les salles de redaction, le silence sur le sujet s'est installe, de sorte qu'il est devenu difficile de soulever la question de maniere significative depuis plusieurs decennies.

Fifteen to 40% of suicides leave suicide notes. Suicide notes have been studied as potentially valuable resources for unlocking the motives of the suicidal person, but these efforts have been hampered by small sample sizes, or analysis of one age group. This book represents the first large scale analysis (1200+ subjects) of motivations for suicide across multiple ages in the same time period, 13% of whom left notes.

The book discusses top motivations for suicide, how these differ between note writers and non-note writers and what this can tell us towards better prevention.

By Cheryl L. Meyer, Taronish H. Irani, Katherine A. Hermes, and Betty Yung
Analyzes data from 1200+ suicides from county coroner’s office in a single decade
Discusses history and theories of suicide
Identifies the top motivations for suicide based on suicide notes
Discusses the extent to which suicides are impulsive v planned
Leads to a better understanding of how to prevent suicide/treat the suicidal

Anchored in queer and crip perspectives, this essay proposes the neologism "suicidism" as a new theoretical framework to conceptualize the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence. The thesis proposed here is that suicidal people suffer both individually and collectively from suicidist violence, an oppression that remains unproblematized in all current interpretations of suicide, including those taken up by anti-oppressive scholars and activists. I pursue three interrelated objectives: 1) interrogate dominant ideas and perspectives on suicidality; 2) make visible and denounce the power relations between suicidal and non-suicidal people; 3) enrich intersectional analyses by naming and problematizing an oppression that has been neglected. In sum, this essay proposes to analyze suicidality by asking the following epistemological questions: What and who is missing from current conceptualizations of suicide? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicide, from queer and crip perspectives, help anti-oppressive scholars and activists avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people? This essay is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the predominant models of suicide to illustrate how they all arrive at the same conclusion-that suicide is never an option-and how this results in a silencing of suicidal subjects. In so doing, I also demonstrate how suicidism is intertwined in forms of ableism/sanism. I conclude this first part by mobilizing the notion of epistemic injustice to theorize both the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by suicidal subjects. In the second part, I explore additional interpretations of suicide that contrast with the dominant "negative" conceptualizations that seek to prevent it in all circumstances. I demonstrate how even "positive" perspectives of suicidality (e.g. the libertarian position) are founded in forms of ableism/sanism, and that even though they may critique the marginalization of suicidal subjects, they don't conceptualize their oppression as systemic, nor address it from an anti-oppressive perspective. Critiquing the "positive" conceptualizations of suicide allows me to delineate an alternative conceptualization of suicide rooted in queer and crip perspectives. Mobilizing a queer perspective to study suicide doesn't mean offering only analyses that take queer theories as a starting point or queer communities as the objects of the study. The intention is rather to queer suicide in a more holistic sense, that is, by applying queering and cripping methods, theories, epistemologies and prevention strategies to the topic of suicidality. Based on a harm-reduction and a non-coercive suicide approach, I suggest that assisted suicide should be a possibility for suicidal people, a position that relies on an ethics of living and a responsibility toward suicidal people.
KEYWORDS:
suicidal people, suicide, suicidism, models to theorize suicide, stigmatisation, ableism/sanism, anti-oppressive perspective, epistemic injustice, critical suicidology

Nietzsche’s view of suicide is a topic which in the last years has been the focus of works such as Julian Young’s and Paul S. Loeb’s. Within this context, this paper seeks to add new elements to the discussion. To this purpose, Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be explored from two different points of view. The first part of the paper focuses on the distinction between voluntary (free) and involuntary (natural) death. Nietzsche’s appraisal of both will be scrutinized. In particular, through the comparison with the Classical and, especially, Stoic philosophy and through the critique of the religious (particularly Christian) conception of death, it will be shown, among other things, that Nietzsche defends the rationality of suicide, presents a view of voluntary death as emptied of morality and fights against the Christian denaturalization of suicide. In the second part of the paper, suicide will be considered from a philosophical-existentialist viewpoint, that is, as a possible consequence of the meaninglessness of human existence. The problem is to judge whether life is or is not worth living in a world devoid of meaning and purpose. Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be analyzed in a chronological way (early, middle and late Nietzsche). Special attention will be given to the role played by art. The relevant conclusion is that, although in different ways, Nietzsche gives an affirmative answer to the question whether life is worth living in a world devoid of meaning and purpose.

Suicidal ideation and suicidal thinking are relevant phenomena to study given their high incidence among university students in higher education, even more so if during the academic period students are affected by a pandemic such as COVID-19. Consequently, this systematic review's objective was to determine the prevalence of suicidal ideation and suicidal thinking in university students during the COVID-19 pandemic and, as a secondary objective, to establish possible risk factors. The search was performed following the PRISMA model in the Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Medline search engines between January 2020 and January 2021, and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to evaluate the methodological quality of the studies. Regarding the results, at the end of the search, nine relevant studies were identified for analysis: four on suicidal thoughts, four on suicidal ideation, and one on suicide as a continuous variable. In conclusion, it was possible to stipulate that the average prevalence of suicidal ideation and suicidal thoughts were 17.8% for the university population. Likewise, the risk factors associated with the appearance of suicidal thoughts and ideation in university students during the COVID-19 pandemic were ethnographic, psychological, contextual, and health factors.

RELIGIOU S SUICIDE HAS developed into a robust fi eld of research in religious studies since 9/u. While much has been written in the conte � of modern religious terrorist attacks,1 relatively little attention has been given to just how integral religious suicide was doctrinally, ritually, historically, and socially to premodern religious traditions. While religious suicide naturally relates to the irreducibilit y of death as a biological fact, premodern people imagined and experienced it within a specific cultural and historical frame work. Like many religious traditions, Buddhism and Daoism understood re ligious suicide as a form of sanctifi ed death. They formulated such sanct � t � on their own terms and provided distinct justification s, even a model, of rehg1ous practice.

Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I conducted research were reduced, in popular discourse about causality, to the categories of debt, unfulfilled aspiration and desires, and romantic failures. Convincing though these explanations are, they do not help to explain why young people everywhere, faced with the same kind of existential crises, do not take their lives in comparable numbers or, indeed, why they utilise particular – and very gendered – methods of harming and/or killing themselves. Ethnographic research, however, illuminates the local specificities against which such existential crises are played out in ways that might aid our search for explanations. In this article, I explore how South Indian notions of personhood – which, in turn, lead to particular understandings and experiences of agency – might impact on how and whether people kill themselves. I also attempt to situate these local explanations of personhood and agency in the wider context of a contemporary, industrialising and, increasingly, neo-liberal India, and, in some measure, to analyse the interplay between the two.

The word ‘suicida’ is not practically
detected until the XVIIth century, and this
fact explains the forced use of periphrasis or
related terms that accomplished on the one
hand the function of designing suicides but
involved on the other senses that exceeded
an aseptic notion of autoinflicted death. The
objective of this article is to raise the problem
of the nonexistence of this term ‘suicida’
in classical and medieval Latin, approaching
the interpretations already tried in some
works dedicated to the history of suicide in
Antiquity and Middle Ages.

Hatten adlige Selbsttötungen in der Frühen Neuzeit ihre Ursache in einer krankhaften Ehrfixierung des Adels oder handelt es sich dabei um eine kritische Zuschreibung von außen? Florian Kühnel untersucht ausgehend von archivalischen wie publizistischen Quellen den gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit Adelssuiziden im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert und fragt nach kollektiven Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmustern. So erhellt er nicht nur die Suizidmotive und die Bedeutung der Ehre für den frühneuzeitlichen Adel, sondern schließt davon auch auf den Wandel der Adligkeit im Übergang zur Moderne: Aus welchen Gründen töteten sich Adlige um 1800 und was sagt das über ihr adliges Selbstverständnis aus?

By accounting for the law’s productive capacity to structure asylum physicians’ encounters with suicide, this essay argues that the antebellum asylum was a technology for the preservation of life. The essay first shows how suicide’s history as a crime encouraged popular attributions of suicide to insanity. What began as a tactic to protect survivors, however, ended by bolstering the professional claims of asylum medicine. Initially it appeared there was much to gain from claiming suicide as their own, but dominion over prevention in fact rendered asylum physicians and their staffs vulnerable in unanticipated ways: for while agents of suicide were effectively evacuated of legal responsibility, a variety of laws made physicians more accountable than ever. Focusing on medical superintendent Amariah Brigham and his staff at the New York State Lunatic Asylum shows how the anxiety of assuming guardianship over the suicidal created networks of accountability that profoundly affected daily life.

In 1951 Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay titled "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable." It is a remarkable poetic meditation on the life-and-death stakes of the literary imagination from a writer who was likely suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, fighting for his life through one depressive episode after another. Written when his critical reputation and fame as Sweden’s greatest new literary phenom had been firmly established following a remarkable outpouring of critically acclaimed work in the late 1940s, the essay marked a point in time when the tides had turned for Dagerman, who now struggled with the opposite of this productive streak in the form of a debilitating bout of writer’s block that would eventually contribute to his suicide two years later. "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable" lays bare the writer’s fragile psyche, not only his faltering ego but his selfless and far from sure-footed ambition to offer something of lasting beauty and meaning to a world indifferent to his very existence. While writing the essay, Dagerman managed to rise temporarily from the depths of his depression and identify the sources of his own consolation and hope in terms that have continued to resonate powerfully with many readers, and fellow writers, over the following 60 years.

Originally published in 1952 in the improbable venue of Husmodern (a magazine dedicated to home economics for Swedish housewives, analogous to American magazines like Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens), the essay was a profound response to a trivial commission from the magazine’s editors, who asked Dagerman to send them “something on the art of living.” The soul- and psyche-searching tour de force that Dagerman composed was not likely what the editors had in mind, but to their credit—and also possibly owing to his celebrity—they published the essay as written. The essay has since been translated into 10 languages and published / reprinted a great many times. This is the first literary translation of the essay into English.

La diosa maya Ixtab es mencionada como ‘diosa de la horca’ en la defensa del provincial fray Diego de Landa ante las acusaciones de haber provocado ahorcamientos durante los procesos inquisitoriales de 1562 en Yucatán. Este alegato ha motivado el estudio y análisis de los principales testimonios relacionados con dichos procesos para atisbar la motivación de estos suicidios. Los resultados arrojados por la investigación analítico-sintética de los principales testimonios de los procesos inquisitoriales concluyen que los ahorcamientos sincrónicos al desarrollo del episodio estaban relacionados con la violencia de este, desechando los suicidios por culto religioso o tendencia cultural al suicidio. Del mismo modo, la deidad Ixtab, como deidad de la horca, podría provenir de una perversión externa a la cultura maya con el fin de exculpar a los religiosos de los ahorcamientos durante la persecución de idolatrías de 1562.

This is the first book to systematically investigate the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die. Contrary to previous scholarship on these texts that assumed these death wishes were simply a desire to escape suffering, Hanne Løland Levinson employs narrative criticism and conversation analysis, together with diachronic methods, to carefully hear each death-wish text in its literary context. She demonstrates that death wishes embody powerful, multi-faceted rhetorical strategies. Grouping the death-wish texts into four main rhetorical strategies of negotiation, expression of despair and anger, longing to undo one's existence, and wishing for a different reality, Løland Levinson portrays the complex reasons why characters in the Hebrew Bible wish for death. She concludes that the death wishes navigate the tension between longing for death and fighting for survival - a tension that many live with also today as they attempt to claim agency and autonomy in life.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, suicide is often discussed in relation to the concept of risk. According to psychiatric understanding of suicide, the risk of suicide is increased under certain circumstances and in connection to mental disorders. Thinking of suicide in terms of risk factors has a historical background in the rise of psychiatric epidemiology during decades after the Second World War. In the case of Finland, the emergence of psychiatric epidemiology of suicide in the 1960s and 1970s also coincides with the building of a welfare state through active use of social planning. In this article, the author examines how social engineering thinking, criticism of biologically oriented psychiatry, and psychiatric epidemiology changed the way how suicide was perceived in the discourse of psychiatry.

This paper will examine two kinds of death found in Virgil's Aeneid through the characters of Dido and Aeneas. I will suggest that both are self-inflicted deaths. The term for self-inflicted death is suicide, which typically refers to a literal, physical death. In this paper I mean to expand the notion of suicidal death beyond its usual corporeal denotation. I am viewing suicide from a psychological perspective as well as from the literal or physical point of view.

Resumen
La otredad ausente en el espacio nacional adquiere en el suicidio la figura del silencio. El silencio del suicidio, con sus intentos de negación, obliteración o encierro y protección en lo no dicho, adquiere su corporeidad en esta ausencia desencantada de otredad. Sin otredad, la violencia resulta una modalidad permanente de habitar el mundo, de significarlo e inscribirlo al revés, esto es, de desimbolizarlo, de desencantarlo, bajo los marcos culturales vernáculos de negación del Otro, carentes de toda trascendentalidad.

Revista de Ciencias Sociales/Dpto. de Sociología, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UDELAR.

Volumen 33. Número 46. Enero - Junio del 2020

Dossier Suicidio y Sociedad
2019-12-23

Kanerva, Kirsi. 2018. Female Suicide in Thirteenth-Century Iceland: The Case of Brynhildr inVölsunga saga. Viator 49 (3), 129-154.https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.119576

The article examines thirteenth-century Icelandic conceptions of female suicide and ideas about their causes and motives by conducting a case study of a saga figure called Brynhildr, who commits suicide. The story of Brynhildr is told in several medieval Icelandic sources: in the mytho-heroic legendary saga (fornaldarsaga) Völsunga saga, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda. The story of Brynhildr in these sources offers fruitful material for the study of the history of suicide, since the northern version in question differs from the southern version of the Brynhildr legend that was known especially in medieval Germany, in which Brynhildr does not kill herself. In this study, the causes and background factors of Brynhildr’s suicide and her motives for her deed, which are described and mentioned in the sources, represent possibilities for female behavior that were part of the mental toolbox of medieval Icelanders. It is argued that the Icelandic audience believed some women committed suicide to protect or restore their honor, or to take revenge, and that such an act required determination, capability to make rational choices, and sense of responsibility. The act could also be seen as a manifestation of power and authority: the woman decided herself when her life would end. However, Brynhildr’s death represents only one possible type of female suicide, and not all were expected to be the same. Committing such a preconceived self-killing as Brynhildr’s required an especially strong will. Most women, who were usually maintained by men, were thought not to possess such might and strength.

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Suicide plays a dynamic role in both the narrative and structure of Dante’s Commedia, and yet the poet does not in fact mention the term ‘suicide’ anywhere in the work: Dido ‘slew herself for love’ (Inf. 5.61), Pier della Vigna describes suicide as a process in which ‘the ferocious soul deserts the body / after it has wrenched up its own roots’ (Inf. 13.94-94), and the anonymous Florentine suicide simply ‘made [his] house into [his] gallows’ (Inf. 13.151). It is thus unsurprising that the notion of mental health in connection with suicide is equally absent in explicit terms. Reading between the lines of Dante’s poetry, however, it becomes clear that the emotive language of the suicides within Dante’s oltremondo, and of Dante the pilgrim as he responds to their narratives, highlights an heterogeneous yet shared experience of loss and despair, mirroring contemporary understandings of mental health issues. Through an analysis of the emotive language associated with the narratives of Dante’s suicides, and the hybrid embodiment of the suicides inscribed in Dante’s text, this paper hopes to explore the ways in which, even inadvertently, Dante reflects on the distancing of the suicides from the civic bodies of their communities, from their own physical bodies, and from the vital rationality of their human minds, and thus to investigate the ways in which the lack of emotional wellbeing experienced by the suicides forces them to the edges of society’s, and their own, consciousness.

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of culturalal factors on the suicidality in a sparsely populated rural district in Sweden, where I worked as a general medical practitioner, for about 18 months in 1984-1986. Most previous studies of suicide take as their point of departure the comparison between group of persons who have committed or attempted suicide, and a group of persons who have not. Efforts are made to make the groups as similar as possible in other respects. While this method gives important clues to the differing factors between the groups, it usually does not take sufficient account of the cultural and situational circumstances/1. Nor does this method lead to a deeper understanding or analysis of the cultural forces and motives which can lie behind suicide. The method rests on the assumption that there are persons who are likely to commit suicide, and others who are not, and that is the difference between the groups which is of interest. Even if this is accepted, the strict separation of the groups must seriously be questioned with reference to the prevalence of suicidal thoughts in a population and the difficulty in analyzing the statistics for attempted suicides but also for completed suicides. By picking out one person from a population and one act from a broad range of cultural behaviours the analysis tends to focus on individual and psychological factors, while the role of culture and society in shaping suicidal behavior is correspondingly underrepresented. The district, where I worked, had a suicide rate, which had, since 1970, been 2-3 times higher than that of the country, the county and the whole commune, of which it was a part. Considering the statistics over a ten-year period, that meant about 50 per 100.000 inhabitants. Four fifths of the suicides were committed by men. The district had a somewhat different history from the rest of the commune. It was inhabited for the first time in modern history by Finns, who were invited by the Duke Karl, later King Karl IX, in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, to come and cultivate the large forests in the west of Sweden; while most other people in the region came earlier from the south, following the rivers. One question put was therefore, whether this special culture and history could have some importance for the high rate of suicide. Material and method To analyze that, I chosed to follow an anthropological tradition of studying societies through "participant observation". All the ways in which I came into contact with suicide, in ordinary conversation, case-histories told, descriptions and comments, medical records and statistics were deemed to be important, and were analyzed in relation to the culture generally.