Amy Chandler
Biographic Data
| ID | 171151 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amy Chandler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amy |
| FAMILY NAME | Chandler |
| SIGNATURE | CHANDLER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9861-9295 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Cruel Optimism of Suicide Prevention
Suicide has long been constructed as an individual, pathological problem of the mind, requiring a combination of clinical care and interpersonal support to prevent it. The endurance of this individualising and pathologising approach serves to reflect and maintain the marginalisation of sociology in suicide studies. This article contributes to redressing this balance, via analysis of creative, qualitative workshops, which formed part of a broader …
Jarring Encounters
In researching experiences and understandings of suicide bereavement across diverse communities in Scotland, we expected to hear difficult, distressing, and painful narratives. However, one of the 31 in-depth qualitative interviews that we conducted was particularly and unexpectedly jarring. In this narrative, Freya explained how her ex-partner took his life after she escaped from his domestic abuse. This narrative produces a deep sense of discom…
Revitalizing the Sociology of Suicide for the 21st Century
Unforeseeable’ and ‘inevitable’
Rates of suicides are on the rise in Scottish prisons. Fatal Accident and Sudden Deaths Inquiries (FAIs) carried out by sheriffs following these deaths provide a valuable source of knowledge regarding how the criminal justice system understands and responds to incarcerated people's suicides. Informed by literature in critical suicide studies and narrative criminology, we conducted an abductive, narrative qualitative analysis of 37 FAI reports of …
Conditions de publication
Dans cet article, je soutiens que la phénoménologie critique, nourrie par une approche critique de la race et des études intersectionnelles, constitue une approche pertinente pour comprendre le suicide et l’automutilation chez les hommes. Je m’appuie sur l’analyse des récits de 10 hommes ayant fait l’expérience de l’automutilation, que j’examine à travers le prisme de la phénoménologie queer de Sara Ahmed. Deux thèmes principaux ressortent de cet…
Boys don’t cry? Phénoménologie critique, automutilation et suicide
Dans cet article, je soutiens que la phénoménologie critique, nourrie par une approche critique de la race et des études intersectionnelles, constitue une approche pertinente pour comprendre le suicide et l’automutilation chez les hommes. Je m’appuie sur l’analyse des récits de 10 hommes ayant fait l’expérience de l’automutilation, que j’examine à travers le prisme de la phénoménologie queer de Sara Ahmed. Deux thèmes principaux ressortent de cet…
Suicide as slow death
Sociological research on suicide has tended to favour functionalist approaches, and quantitative methods. This article argues for an alternative engagement - drawing on interpretive paradigms, and inspired by 'live' methodologies, we make an argument for a haunted sociology of suicide. This approach, informed by Avery Gordon's haunted sociological imagination and Lauren Berlant's concept of slow death, works between the structural realities of in…
Provoked perplexity in live methods
This article contributes to literature on live methods and specifically to the idea of research as an informed provocation of experience in the context of growing methodological experimentation in social science research. The liveness of our method sits with our close attention to inquiry as encompassing of human/non-human relational encounters that, drawing upon a materialism of lively matter, come together in the form of material thinking. We s…
The politics of LGBT+ suicide and suicide prevention in the UK
Suicide is a major public health concern, patterned by systematic inequalities, with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people being one example of a minoritised group that is more likely to think about and attempt suicide worldwide. To address this, UK national suicide prevention policies have suggested that LGBT+ people should be prioritised in prevention activities. However, there is little research seeking to understand how LGBT+ suicid…
Accounts of women identified as drinking at ‘high risk’ during pregnancy
BACKGROUND: Drinking alcohol during pregnancy is associated with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and women who drink at higher levels are more likely to have a baby with FASD. Public health responses focus on population-level approaches to FASD prevention such as promoting abstinence and alcohol brief interventions. Efforts to better understand and respond to 'high risk' drinking during pregnancy have been largely ignored. This meta-eth…
Establishing research priorities for investigating male suicide risk and recovery
This study uses the Delphi expert consensus method to work with lived-experience experts and establish research priorities to advance our understanding of male suicide risk and recovery. Items for the Delphi were generated via findings from two recent quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews on male suicide, a comprehensive gray literature search, responses to a global survey on male suicide, and feedback from a panel of 10 international a…
Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance
Suicide prevention policies set out government strategies and priorities for action and in doing so construct meanings, legitimise knowledge and frame possibilities. Despite their importance, prevention policies remain underexamined and taken for granted. Using Bacchi's poststructuralist ‘What's The Problem Represented To Be’ approach we critically analyse UK suicide prevention policies as sites of biopolitical surveillance and consider how suici…
Critical suicide studies, between methodology and ethics
Critical Suicide Studies developed across the 2010s as a means to theorise and intervene in suicide from perspectives alternative to the 'mainstream' of suicidology.What the critical approach understands as 'mainstream' or 'traditional' suicidology can be characterised as originating in two key ways: a North American ego-psychological framework that posited suicide as an individual act resulting from poor mental health (Shneidman, 1985), and a Eu…
Dangerous Arms and Everyday Activism
Using the format of dialogue, this paper is a collaborative exploration of navigating academia in self-harm scarred bodies. Prompted by the proposal of social media regulators to blur and ban self-harm scars, thus communicating such bodies as “dangerous,” our dialogue considers personal notions of activism, researcher identity, emotional labor, future potential, and the importance of finding and building communities for embodied solidarity. Struc…
The Violence of the Cut
Taking as a starting point the frequent characterisation of self-harm as "an adolescent thing for girls," this paper offers a sociologically informed, qualitative exploration of self-harm as a gendered practice. We move beyond statistical constructions of this "reality," and critically examine how this characterisation comes to be, and some of its effects. Our data are drawn from a pilot study that developed a collaborative arts-based inquiry int…
Masculinities and suicide
An increasingly common way that high rates of male suicide are understood is via men’s ostensibly poorer abilities to talk about – and more generally seek help for – problems in general, and emotional problems specifically. This has led to the development of public mental health campaigns which urge men to ‘speak up’ more often about the problems they face. I argue that both the initial claim, and the enactment of this claim in public mental heal…
The social life of self-harm in general practice
Socioeconomic inequalities of suicide
Suicide is complex; yet suicide research is dominated by 'psy' disciplines which can falter when seeking to explain social patterning of suicide rates, and how this relates to individual actions. This article discusses a multidisciplinary report which aimed to advance understandings of socioeconomic inequalities in suicide rates in the UK. Contrasts are drawn between health psychology and sociology. Important intersections are highlighted, includ…
Diagnosing uncertainty, producing neonatal abstinence syndrome
The use of alcohol and other drugs during pregnancy is understood to be an important public health problem. One way in which this problem is expressed and responded to is via the identification and treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). In this article, we demonstrate how the processes of anticipating, identifying and responding to NAS are characterised by significant uncertainty among parents and health and social care practitioners. W…
Parents and substance use
Problematisation and regulation
Engaging experience
Crisis, what crisis? A feminist analysis of discourse on masculinities and suicide
High male suicide rates are often constructed as evidence for an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’. Conversely, ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been used to explain differential rates of male and female suicide in the UK (and elsewhere). We analyse three public cases where male suicide and ‘masculinity-crisis’ discourse are employed together. Our feminist analysis demonstrates that ‘crisis talk’ and male suicide are addressed in divergent ways. We the…
Boys don't cry? Critical phenomenology, self-harm and suicide
In this article I argue that critical phenomenology, informed by critical race and intersectional scholarship, offers a useful lens through which to consider suicide and self-harm among men. To illustrate this, I draw on a narrative informed analysis of the accounts of 10 men who had experienced self-harm, read through Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology. Two themes are emphasised: gendered, raced, classed bodies that are (unexpectedly) stopped; and…
Seeking Secrecy
Young people who self-harm face challenges in seeking help, and there is a lack of qualitative research with under 16s despite rates of self-harm being high and help-seeking low. Data were collected from 122 young people aged 13–26 years, 108 of whom were aged 13–16 years, through multiple methods. This included six focus group discussions with 33 young people who had limited experience of self-harm; in-depth interviews with five people who had s…
Daily Transmission of Tensions between Marital Dyads and Parent-Child Dyads
David M. Almeida, Elaine Wethington, Amy L. Chandler, Daily Transmission of Tensions between Marital Dyads and Parent-Child Dyads, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 49-61
Crisis, what crisis? A feminist analysis of discourse on masculinities and suicide
High male suicide rates are often constructed as evidence for an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’. Conversely, ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been used to explain differential rates of male and female suicide in the UK (and elsewhere). We analyse three public cases where male suicide and ‘masculinity-crisis’ discourse are employed together. Our feminist analysis demonstrates that ‘crisis talk’ and male suicide are addressed in divergent ways. We the…
Inviting pain? Pain, dualism and embodiment in narratives of self-injury
The role of pain in the practice of self-injury is not straightforward. Existing accounts suggest that self-injury does not cause 'physical' pain, however self-injury is also said to alleviate 'emotional' pain by inflicting 'physical' pain. This article explores these tensions using sociological theories regarding the socio-cultural and subjective nature of pain. Analysis derives from in-depth, life-story interviews carried out in the UK with peo…
Socioeconomic inequalities of suicide
Suicide is complex; yet suicide research is dominated by 'psy' disciplines which can falter when seeking to explain social patterning of suicide rates, and how this relates to individual actions. This article discusses a multidisciplinary report which aimed to advance understandings of socioeconomic inequalities in suicide rates in the UK. Contrasts are drawn between health psychology and sociology. Important intersections are highlighted, includ…
Boys don't cry? Critical phenomenology, self-harm and suicide
In this article I argue that critical phenomenology, informed by critical race and intersectional scholarship, offers a useful lens through which to consider suicide and self-harm among men. To illustrate this, I draw on a narrative informed analysis of the accounts of 10 men who had experienced self-harm, read through Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology. Two themes are emphasised: gendered, raced, classed bodies that are (unexpectedly) stopped; and…
Self-injury as Embodied Emotion Work
Drawing on narrative research conducted in the UK about self-injury and embodiment, this article presents a novel sociological analysis of self-injury, utilizing the concept of emotion work. By focusing explicitly on embodied methods of 'doing' emotion work, the article highlights the under-recognized importance of examining the practical, corporeal practices that can be involved in emotion work. I reflect on the sociological and theoretical sign…
Narrating the self-injured body
Illness narratives have traditionally been used as a conceptual tool for exploring experiences of chronic illness or disease. In this paper, I suggest that Frank's typology of illness narratives (chaos, restitution and quest) also offers an illuminating approach to analysing accounts of self-injury, demonstrating the diverse ways in which self-injury is practiced, experienced and narrated. Drawing on 24 narrative interviews with 12 people who had…
The burden of care
Parenting and family support are key prevention and intervention strategies for improving outcomes for children and families affected by parental drug misuse. However, little is known about the delivery of parenting support for drug-dependent parents, particularly within universal healthcare services. This study aimed to explore the way healthcare practitioners engage with this challenging agenda. Four multidisciplinary focus groups involving a p…
Critical suicide studies, between methodology and ethics
Critical Suicide Studies developed across the 2010s as a means to theorise and intervene in suicide from perspectives alternative to the 'mainstream' of suicidology.What the critical approach understands as 'mainstream' or 'traditional' suicidology can be characterised as originating in two key ways: a North American ego-psychological framework that posited suicide as an individual act resulting from poor mental health (Shneidman, 1985), and a Eu…
Seeking Secrecy
Young people who self-harm face challenges in seeking help, and there is a lack of qualitative research with under 16s despite rates of self-harm being high and help-seeking low. Data were collected from 122 young people aged 13–26 years, 108 of whom were aged 13–16 years, through multiple methods. This included six focus group discussions with 33 young people who had limited experience of self-harm; in-depth interviews with five people who had s…
Establishing research priorities for investigating male suicide risk and recovery
This study uses the Delphi expert consensus method to work with lived-experience experts and establish research priorities to advance our understanding of male suicide risk and recovery. Items for the Delphi were generated via findings from two recent quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews on male suicide, a comprehensive gray literature search, responses to a global survey on male suicide, and feedback from a panel of 10 international a…
The social life of self-harm in general practice
Suicide as slow death
Sociological research on suicide has tended to favour functionalist approaches, and quantitative methods. This article argues for an alternative engagement - drawing on interpretive paradigms, and inspired by 'live' methodologies, we make an argument for a haunted sociology of suicide. This approach, informed by Avery Gordon's haunted sociological imagination and Lauren Berlant's concept of slow death, works between the structural realities of in…
Provoked perplexity in live methods
This article contributes to literature on live methods and specifically to the idea of research as an informed provocation of experience in the context of growing methodological experimentation in social science research. The liveness of our method sits with our close attention to inquiry as encompassing of human/non-human relational encounters that, drawing upon a materialism of lively matter, come together in the form of material thinking. We s…
Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance
Suicide prevention policies set out government strategies and priorities for action and in doing so construct meanings, legitimise knowledge and frame possibilities. Despite their importance, prevention policies remain underexamined and taken for granted. Using Bacchi's poststructuralist ‘What's The Problem Represented To Be’ approach we critically analyse UK suicide prevention policies as sites of biopolitical surveillance and consider how suici…
Diagnosing uncertainty, producing neonatal abstinence syndrome
The use of alcohol and other drugs during pregnancy is understood to be an important public health problem. One way in which this problem is expressed and responded to is via the identification and treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). In this article, we demonstrate how the processes of anticipating, identifying and responding to NAS are characterised by significant uncertainty among parents and health and social care practitioners. W…
Daily Transmission of Tensions between Marital Dyads and Parent-Child Dyads
David M. Almeida, Elaine Wethington, Amy L. Chandler, Daily Transmission of Tensions between Marital Dyads and Parent-Child Dyads, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 49-61
Self-injury as Embodied Emotion Work
Drawing on narrative research conducted in the UK about self-injury and embodiment, this article presents a novel sociological analysis of self-injury, utilizing the concept of emotion work. By focusing explicitly on embodied methods of 'doing' emotion work, the article highlights the under-recognized importance of examining the practical, corporeal practices that can be involved in emotion work. I reflect on the sociological and theoretical sign…
Substance, structure and stigma
Inviting pain? Pain, dualism and embodiment in narratives of self-injury
The role of pain in the practice of self-injury is not straightforward. Existing accounts suggest that self-injury does not cause 'physical' pain, however self-injury is also said to alleviate 'emotional' pain by inflicting 'physical' pain. This article explores these tensions using sociological theories regarding the socio-cultural and subjective nature of pain. Analysis derives from in-depth, life-story interviews carried out in the UK with peo…
Narrating the self-injured body
Illness narratives have traditionally been used as a conceptual tool for exploring experiences of chronic illness or disease. In this paper, I suggest that Frank's typology of illness narratives (chaos, restitution and quest) also offers an illuminating approach to analysing accounts of self-injury, demonstrating the diverse ways in which self-injury is practiced, experienced and narrated. Drawing on 24 narrative interviews with 12 people who had…
The burden of care
Parenting and family support are key prevention and intervention strategies for improving outcomes for children and families affected by parental drug misuse. However, little is known about the delivery of parenting support for drug-dependent parents, particularly within universal healthcare services. This study aimed to explore the way healthcare practitioners engage with this challenging agenda. Four multidisciplinary focus groups involving a p…
Seeking Secrecy
Young people who self-harm face challenges in seeking help, and there is a lack of qualitative research with under 16s despite rates of self-harm being high and help-seeking low. Data were collected from 122 young people aged 13–26 years, 108 of whom were aged 13–16 years, through multiple methods. This included six focus group discussions with 33 young people who had limited experience of self-harm; in-depth interviews with five people who had s…
Parents and substance use
Problematisation and regulation
Engaging experience
Crisis, what crisis? A feminist analysis of discourse on masculinities and suicide
High male suicide rates are often constructed as evidence for an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’. Conversely, ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been used to explain differential rates of male and female suicide in the UK (and elsewhere). We analyse three public cases where male suicide and ‘masculinity-crisis’ discourse are employed together. Our feminist analysis demonstrates that ‘crisis talk’ and male suicide are addressed in divergent ways. We the…
Boys don't cry? Critical phenomenology, self-harm and suicide
In this article I argue that critical phenomenology, informed by critical race and intersectional scholarship, offers a useful lens through which to consider suicide and self-harm among men. To illustrate this, I draw on a narrative informed analysis of the accounts of 10 men who had experienced self-harm, read through Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology. Two themes are emphasised: gendered, raced, classed bodies that are (unexpectedly) stopped; and…
The social life of self-harm in general practice
Socioeconomic inequalities of suicide
Suicide is complex; yet suicide research is dominated by 'psy' disciplines which can falter when seeking to explain social patterning of suicide rates, and how this relates to individual actions. This article discusses a multidisciplinary report which aimed to advance understandings of socioeconomic inequalities in suicide rates in the UK. Contrasts are drawn between health psychology and sociology. Important intersections are highlighted, includ…
Diagnosing uncertainty, producing neonatal abstinence syndrome
The use of alcohol and other drugs during pregnancy is understood to be an important public health problem. One way in which this problem is expressed and responded to is via the identification and treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). In this article, we demonstrate how the processes of anticipating, identifying and responding to NAS are characterised by significant uncertainty among parents and health and social care practitioners. W…
Dangerous Arms and Everyday Activism
Using the format of dialogue, this paper is a collaborative exploration of navigating academia in self-harm scarred bodies. Prompted by the proposal of social media regulators to blur and ban self-harm scars, thus communicating such bodies as “dangerous,” our dialogue considers personal notions of activism, researcher identity, emotional labor, future potential, and the importance of finding and building communities for embodied solidarity. Struc…
The Violence of the Cut
Taking as a starting point the frequent characterisation of self-harm as "an adolescent thing for girls," this paper offers a sociologically informed, qualitative exploration of self-harm as a gendered practice. We move beyond statistical constructions of this "reality," and critically examine how this characterisation comes to be, and some of its effects. Our data are drawn from a pilot study that developed a collaborative arts-based inquiry int…
Masculinities and suicide
An increasingly common way that high rates of male suicide are understood is via men’s ostensibly poorer abilities to talk about – and more generally seek help for – problems in general, and emotional problems specifically. This has led to the development of public mental health campaigns which urge men to ‘speak up’ more often about the problems they face. I argue that both the initial claim, and the enactment of this claim in public mental heal…
Critical suicide studies, between methodology and ethics
Critical Suicide Studies developed across the 2010s as a means to theorise and intervene in suicide from perspectives alternative to the 'mainstream' of suicidology.What the critical approach understands as 'mainstream' or 'traditional' suicidology can be characterised as originating in two key ways: a North American ego-psychological framework that posited suicide as an individual act resulting from poor mental health (Shneidman, 1985), and a Eu…
The politics of LGBT+ suicide and suicide prevention in the UK
Suicide is a major public health concern, patterned by systematic inequalities, with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people being one example of a minoritised group that is more likely to think about and attempt suicide worldwide. To address this, UK national suicide prevention policies have suggested that LGBT+ people should be prioritised in prevention activities. However, there is little research seeking to understand how LGBT+ suicid…
Accounts of women identified as drinking at ‘high risk’ during pregnancy
BACKGROUND: Drinking alcohol during pregnancy is associated with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and women who drink at higher levels are more likely to have a baby with FASD. Public health responses focus on population-level approaches to FASD prevention such as promoting abstinence and alcohol brief interventions. Efforts to better understand and respond to 'high risk' drinking during pregnancy have been largely ignored. This meta-eth…
Establishing research priorities for investigating male suicide risk and recovery
This study uses the Delphi expert consensus method to work with lived-experience experts and establish research priorities to advance our understanding of male suicide risk and recovery. Items for the Delphi were generated via findings from two recent quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews on male suicide, a comprehensive gray literature search, responses to a global survey on male suicide, and feedback from a panel of 10 international a…
Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance
Suicide prevention policies set out government strategies and priorities for action and in doing so construct meanings, legitimise knowledge and frame possibilities. Despite their importance, prevention policies remain underexamined and taken for granted. Using Bacchi's poststructuralist ‘What's The Problem Represented To Be’ approach we critically analyse UK suicide prevention policies as sites of biopolitical surveillance and consider how suici…
Unforeseeable’ and ‘inevitable’
Rates of suicides are on the rise in Scottish prisons. Fatal Accident and Sudden Deaths Inquiries (FAIs) carried out by sheriffs following these deaths provide a valuable source of knowledge regarding how the criminal justice system understands and responds to incarcerated people's suicides. Informed by literature in critical suicide studies and narrative criminology, we conducted an abductive, narrative qualitative analysis of 37 FAI reports of …
Conditions de publication
Dans cet article, je soutiens que la phénoménologie critique, nourrie par une approche critique de la race et des études intersectionnelles, constitue une approche pertinente pour comprendre le suicide et l’automutilation chez les hommes. Je m’appuie sur l’analyse des récits de 10 hommes ayant fait l’expérience de l’automutilation, que j’examine à travers le prisme de la phénoménologie queer de Sara Ahmed. Deux thèmes principaux ressortent de cet…
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Medicine (16 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Suicide and Self-Harm Studies (12 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Poison control (8 works)