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Cultural Clues: Meaning making about suicide in Australia

Cultural Clues: Meaning making about suicide in Australia

The aim of this study was to investigate beliefs imbedded in Australian culture about suicide. This paper presents a study of Australian discourses about suicide and suicide bereavement. Discourse analysis is a complex, in-depth tool for discovering cultural meanings for suicide not fully available in consciousness. Bereaved by suicide in 2009, I grappled with diverse meanings of suicide and the attitudes of myself and those around me. As a sensitised observer-researcher, I documented cultural clues to engage in meaning making about the death and its circumstances. As Bodin writes: ‘the modern self tries to reread the past in terms of its present situation’’ (2008, p.277).

Through this process of immersion and reflection, six discourses around suicide were identified: rebellion, mental illness, family dysfunction, an individual choice or right, cowardice, and attention seeking. Pathologising discourses around suicide bereavement also became evident. Survivors are invited by health professionals to view themselves as traumatised, ‘shattered’ and ‘wounded’. Cultural discourses around suicide shape the meaning making process following suicide, complicated by the taboo on open discussion of suicide. Further research is needed on how to support healthy grieving for people bereaved by suicide.

Speakers: Prof Ione Lewis
Areas of Interest / Categories: ANZAP 2014

ANZAP 2014

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In our work as therapists we constantly seek to develop our patients’ capacity for relatedness. Spiritual seeking in its purest forms is the pursuit of levels of development beyond the aims of most psychotherapy patients, but is understandable as a profound extension of this capacity in relation to both humanity and the divine.

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The aims and objectives of this paper are to demonstrate the underlying ‘musical thematic’ structure of embodied meaning between psychotherapist and patient and to discuss how this gives insight into the interpersonal dynamics of psychotherapeutic healing. The model of Communicative Musicality (Malloch, 1999; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009), like that of the Conversational Model (Meares, 2004), has its origins in the investigation of mutuality in the infant-caregiver relationship. We observe in this relationship an exquisite mutually regulated interchange of embodied narratives of affect which enable caregiver and infant to spend meaningful time together.

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