Conference Agenda

Suicide prevention research, policy and practice increasingly highlights the central role of lived experience perspectives. However, historically, suicide prevention and suicidology have excluded lived experience voices – both explicitly and implicitly. The devaluing of qualitative research, and the relative lack of diverse disciplinary contributions beyond psychology and psychiatry each contribute to this situation; resulting in limited spaces where ‘lived experience’ knowledge is invited, accepted, or able to contribute – let alone lead.

I invite a reimagining of suicide prevention work (encompassing research, policy and practice). My approach is informed by a critical engagement with lived experience –my own, the many research collaborators I and others have worked with in qualitative studies of suicide, and the growing number of suicide scholars who also work from and in ‘lived experience’. This work is situated across diverse traditions of social science – sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies. I will argue that such disciplinary diversity is essential if lived experience perspectives are to be properly integrated into suicide studies and suicide prevention.

My own research with and from lived experience perspectives, situated across sociology and the multidisciplinary space of critical suicide studies, has informed a radical reorienting of how we understand and respond to the ‘problem’ of suicide. I show how critical engagement with lived experience perspectives has thrown up significant and far-reaching limits to many established suicide prevention approaches: surveillance, crisis response, and clinical treatment. I will sketch out my team’s current work which centres the possibilities of ‘liveability’ as an alternative way of imagining and enacting responses to suicide.