What can critical suicidology do?

Abstract

Critical suicidology is an emerging area of scholarship and praxis that brings together academics, community activists, service users, practitioners, policy makers, family members, and persons with lived experience, to rethink what it means to study suicide and enact practices of suicide prevention in more diverse and creative, less psychocentric and less depoliticized, ways. In this article, I begin to articulate what it might mean to "think like a critical suicidologist," the questions that might get asked from this position, the academic and activist allies who might get recruited to the cause, and the potential cracks we might open up in pursuit of a more hopeful, life-affirming, and just future.