Conference Agenda

This keynote explores three moments in history - 413, 1821, and 1990 - when new ways of framing, understanding, and responding to suicide emerged. Each marked the convergence of new forms of knowledge, institutions, and practices that fundamentally reshaped how suicide was understood, experienced, and managed.

A ‘critical history of the present’ can reveal how modern suicide prevention - and, indeed, contemporary experiences of suicide and suicidality - came into being, while also illuminating its limitations. High rates of suicide persist despite increasingly sophisticated efforts to predict, manage, and prevent it, while many of the assumptions and practices underpinning prevention have remained largely unchanged for nearly two centuries.

Understanding the “strange persistence” of suicide requires attention not only to the systems designed to prevent it, but also to how people encounter, interpret, and sometimes resist those interventions. If the ways we currently understand suicide are historically produced - and constrained by inherent limitations - then new ways of describing and thinking about it may be needed. Drawing on Richard Rorty’s idea that cultural change begins by “speaking differently,” the keynote concludes by proposing that re-describing suicide - for example, as a question of social justice or as a form of resistance to power - may open new possibilities for how we understand and respond to it.