By Erika Pepe and Noah Brennan
Content warning: Mentions of Suicide and Sucidial Ideation.
Case Description
In September 2022, the University of Saskatchewan unveiled a suicide prevention campaign targeting post-secondary students in Saskatchewan. Part of the campaign was a video called, “Suicide Prevention: You are not alone.” which addresses the high suicide rates amongst post-secondary students in Canada.[1] The video outlines a framework of suicide prevention through the testimonial of a student who previously experienced suicidal thoughts. The purpose of the video is to encourage people to reach out for help and to educate the audience about the warning signs that a person may be suicidal. The ethical issues we discuss in this case engage the dominant conceptualizations of suicide, which oppress and silence suicidal people and hinder society’s ability to better understand and help them.[2]
The video represents a suicidal person through images of an animated figure in a distressed state, alone, with his head buried in his hands. Contrasting images show this person when he is no longer having thoughts of suicide, with the sun shining, surrounded by his community. The bridge between these binary states from suicidal to ex-suicidal is crossed by “reaching out”, which is the primary mechanism for suicide prevention that the video presents.
A secondary mechanism for suicide prevention is given by informing the audience of the “10 Warning Signs” suggesting that a person may be suicidal; the list implies an obligation on the part of the audience to be able to recognize and intervene when they suspect someone may be suicidal. This approach reflects a model of suicide in which the agency of people experiencing suicidal feelings is dismissed and people who are not living with such feelings are made superior. In a sanist, ableist society, suicide is deemed to be irrational and those pondering ending their lives are presumed to have a mental illness, which serves to further dismantle their credibility when advocating for themselves.[3]
Critical Analysis of Ethical Issues Involved
In his conceptualization of suicidism articulated in his book, Undoing Suicidism, Alexandre Baril argues that dominant models of understanding suicide all share the similar outcome: that suicide is not an option,[4] and that is certainly true within the context of the U of S video.
Beyond sanism and ableism, Baril’s approach to suicide involves a critique of systems of oppression such as capitalism.[5] In the U of S Video, the narrator attributes his previous suicidal thoughts to being in a “depressive cycle”[6], which led to him missing class and ultimately feeling useless.[7] These feelings reflect a perceived failure to participate in a capitalist society that emphasizes an individual’s value as determined by their economic utility. The video provides a reductive cause of suicidal thoughts linked to these feelings of uselessness and normalizes an ideology in which it is rational to have suicidal thoughts due to a perceived failure to offer utility. The video reinforces the idea that a suicidal person is defective and needs to fix themselves in order to rejoin a community or society based on capitalism.
The choice of narrator raises the ethical issue of whose stories we listen to and why. In this case, our expert is an ex-suicidal person who tells the audience, “You need to push yourself to reach out.”[8] The narrator commands suicidal people to liberate themselves from their suicidal thoughts using power derived from his position as an ex-suicidal person. The notion within suicidism that forces of oppression diminish the agency of suicidal people to speak for themselves is apparent in the fact that the dominant voice on the solution to suicidal thoughts in this video is that of someone who is no longer suicidal.
Testimonial injustice is an epistemic injustice that, “perceive[s] the judgment of suicidal people to be irrational, incompetent, illegitimate, or alienated and destroy the suicidal subject’s credibility and agency.”[9] When providing testimony publicly, testimonial smothering pushes individuals to manipulate their stories to “make them more palatable”.[10] In the U of S video, the narrator’s story fits the purpose of the video, which is to communicate the urgency to “fix” suicidal people and offer an authoritative solution with an easily digestible framework for suicide prevention. By giving this testimonial narrative authority, the video provides limited insights into understanding people experiencing suicidal thoughts and how to help them more effectively.
In our class discussion surrounding suicide prevention efforts at Western, we explored the frequent associations of suicide prevention with crisis narratives, which imply acuity. This is reflected in the U of S video, which presents the story of a student as an arc –“from experiencing suicidal thoughts, to reaching out, to recovery”[11] and neglects to engage with any testimonials that may complicate this narrative. Callison and Young’s book, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (2020) presents the notion that framing an issue as a crisis brings limitations to the causes and solutions to the issue.[12] By recognizing and acknowledging these limitations in contemporary suicide prevention efforts, further reconceptualization and disruption of dominant models of suicide may bring forth unprecedented solutions that allow for more effective suicide prevention tactics.
Discussion Questions:
- In the context of suicide prevention, how do we see the notion of crisis providing “limited explanations for both causes and solutions”?
- How might the identity of the narrator influence their ability to “reach out” for help in their community?
- How might digital technology and social networking sights offer novel approaches to suicide prevention?
- How could a communications professional acknowledge Baril’s conceptualization of suicidism in their work?
Bibliography
Baril, Alexandre. Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking
(Assisted) Suicide, 41-97. Temple University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5104041.
Callison, Candis, and Mary Lynn Young. “Opening up Journalism’s Crisis.” In Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, 1-23. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190067076.003.0001.
University of Saskatchewan. “Suicide Prevention: You are not alone.” YouTube, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7eE5G5Baps.
Footnotes
[1] University of Saskatchewan, “Suicide Prevention: You are not alone,” YouTube video, September 7, 2022, 0:06-0:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7eE5G5Baps.
[2] Baril, Alexandre, Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking
(Assisted) Suicide, Temple University Press, 2023, 44.
[3] Baril, 89.
[4] Baril, 44.
[5] Baril, 80.
[6] University of Saskatchewan, 0:23.
[7] University of Saskatchewan, 0:38-0:48.
[8] University of Saskatchewan, 2:03-2:05.
[9] Baril, 92.
[10] Baril, 94.
[11] University of Saskatchewan, Video description.
[12] Callison, Candis, and Mary Lynn Young, “Opening up Journalism’s Crisis,” In Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, 1-23, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.