Conference Agenda

To rethink suicide research and prevention, it is first necessary to reflect critically around the way we understand suicide/suicidality. Officially, suicide is currently understood as a biopsychosocial phenomenon, in that biological, psychological and social risk factors are considered. However, the biopsychosocial model does not provide any recipe for how to combine the three components. A lack of common ground results in rather eclectic employments of the model, and the components are never truly combined. Besides, there is plenty of evidence that suicide still mainly is considered a biomedical/psychopathological phenomenon. The way we understand and research suicide, has implications for how we try to prevent it, and whether biomedical or biopsychosocial, the risk perspective per se is problematic and limits suicide prevention to various forms of intervention. In this presentation, I will take a critical look at the evidence base for some of the common assumptions in suicidology. I will argue that we need to accept that suicide is complex way beyond being “multifactorial,” as in adding together risk factors in more or less complex explanatory/predictive models and present a different way of understanding causality and complexity in relation to suicide. I will also argue that suicide/suicidality may best be understood as a complex relational, contextual and existential phenomenon. The potential for improved suicide prevention then lies in understanding that all suffering has its basis in people’s life history; a life history deeply anchored in numerous interwoven relations to other people, which, in turn, are intertwined with overall social, cultural, economic, and political systems, together constituting a complex dynamic context. Thus, we need to move from an emphasis on general and impersonal risk factors to a focus on individuals’ subjective and contextual meanings of suicide. This may contribute to expand suicide prevention from mainly intervention to also genuine prevention.