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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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Awareness of trauma to children was first codified as the “battered baby syndrome” by Henry Kempe in 1962. While Accident & Emergency Departments, paediatricians and social workers remain alert to these presentations, it seems that child sexual abuse and the range of emotional abuse particularly in disorders of Attachment, have come to the fore in psychotherapy. The sequelae of physical abuse are not always highlighted in the discussions of Complex Trauma but occur, as expected, often in association with other forms of abuse. 

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The renewal of the natural order through meaning: The evolutionary spiral of ‘self’ realisation

Evolutionary change can now be studied at extraordinary scales; and these scales involve increasing evidence of semiotic (or sign based) expansion in telodynamic systems – systems which appear oriented to goals and even to self-correction (Shapiro 2011; Deacon 2012). Here I wish to explore how the emergence of the human self can be understood as an expansion of meaning potential, in particular, as a product of a ‘strategy’ of doubling and differentiation. My argument reviews the role of semiotic behaviour from bacteria to the collective consciousness that underpins human language. I further argue that the ‘stages’ of differentiation – e.g.. head to tail; top vs. underneath; right to left symmetry; hemispheric brains – all employ a double with differentiated function.

The Musicality of Therapeutic Conversations

Therapy requires the patient and therapist to be in a mutually aware relationship. An underlying characteristic of this relationship is that both parties aim towards ‘feeling felt’. The human necessity for ‘feeling felt’ is at the very beginning of the human journey. In a sensitive caregiver-infant relationship the infant and caregiver ‘take in’ the other’s inner state through giving their awareness purposefully to the other’s communicative gestures. This ‘taking in’ is confirmed moment-by-moment through the ‘giving back’ (mirroring) of these gestures. But for the relationship to be alive, in the giving back there must also be the addition of the other person’s inner state. In adulthood this intersubjectively shaped storytelling, created through gestures and words, characterises the space where trauma can be healed in relationship.

Psychotherapy, Spiritual Development and Relatedness: three sides of the same coin.

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.

Embodied mutual meaning unfolding through time as substrate of clinical complexity

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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