Telling stories

I am a writer and an educationalist: a poet, an author, a trainer, and an activist. For the last 15 years, I have authored papers and books, delivered training c ourses, and spoken to staff and service users in services from prisons to community projects. Although my work is informed by many sources of knowledge, my own experiences of suicidality and self-injury are at its core.

The invitation to respond to Fitzpatrick’s article (2016) included the specification that it must be ‘academically rigorous.’ Immediately, I assumed that I must adopt a position of third-person objectivity. In this, I am influenced by centuries of thought. From the Enlightenment onward, the scientific method of objective, empirical observation has been dominant in most disciplines, and especially prominent in medicine. For example, the British Medical Association states: “The work and approach of the medical profession are based on scientific method, defining ‘science’ in the strictest sense of the word” (1986, p. 61). According to this approach, writing as ‘I’—with a worldview explicitly affected by experience and emotion—would be an attempt to give personal bias the status of ‘truth’: at best, lacking in academic rigor, at worst, potentially destructive in its consequences for knowledge and the world it shapes.

Fitzpatrick locates suicidology within this approach, pointing out that it has been “dominated for the most part by epidemiology, clinical psychiatry, and psychology” (2016, p. 266). With the exception of David Webb (2010), to whom Fitzpatrick refers, few suicidologists refer explicitly to personal experience of suicide; even fewer draw from personal experience (as survivor, bereaved, or practitioner) as a resource for knowledge and insight. Indeed, Fitzpatrick makes no reference to his own narrative. This absence of emotion and personal reflection partly explains why suicidology “has been criticized by those bereaved by suicide for its objectivity, inaccessibility, use of inappropriate terminology, and for sanitizing the ‘raw’ reality of suicide” (2016, p. 266). When Fitzpatrick outlines how and why suicidology has taken the ‘narrative turn’ evident in the wider field of bioethics, he indirectly traces my career over the last 20 years.

As a psychiatric inpatient, my experiences and ideas were viewed as invalid sources of knowledge or insight. This is not uncommon. As one of the most written-about groups, mental health service users are also one of the most marginalized in terms of the construction of knowledge. There are fewer more effective ways of devaluing someone’s account of reality than by calling it ‘mad.’

As I became involved within mental health service user movements and feminism, I began to draw from the standpoint epistemology approach (e.g., Stanley & Wise, 1983) so crucial to progressive social movements. I developed the belief that my experiences are not only a valid source of knowledge, but also offer a unique insight into the issues at hand (Faulkner & Morris, 2003). This belief remains central to my career.

As a writer, I am aware that every account is written for a particular purpose; and as Fitzpatrick recognizes, the purpose of the suicide narrative is often to effect social and political change—a form of ‘moral education.’ His critical reading of suicide narratives highlights a central problem within my own work. If we acknowledge the importance of language and reflection, we must also acknowledge the constructed nature of our own narratives, and reflect on the consequences of the structures revealed therein.

In Fitzpatrick’s reading, the structure of the conventional suicide narrative is “person experiences profound suffering, illness, trauma, or psychological pain; person attempts suicide; person survives; person recovers through a gradual process of self-awareness, self-control, and personal and professional support” (2016, p. 269). Uncomfortably, here I recognize my own story.

Uncomfortable, because it challenges my claim to ‘truth,’ and also because Fitzpatrick presents a compelling argument that this narrative structure is constructed by the institutions that I have critiqued throughout my activist life. Just as Davies (1995) deconstructs Fraser’s My father’s house: A memoir of incest and recovery (1989) to critique how the individualized psychoanalytical framework that structures her narrative obscures other, more radical, accounts, so Fitzpatrick argues that current suicide narratives reproduce individualized...