Our Encounters with Suicide

Our Encounters with Suicide is part of an extended collection that contemplates narratives of lived experiences by service users, carers and survivors from both sides of the Atlantic. It is a collection of stories that are organised thematically into five interesting areas: Witnessing Suicide, Living in the Wake of Suicide, Thinking Suicide, Surviving Suicide and Defending Suicide. Each of these chapters can be read discreetly, which will appeal to a broad audience, or the book can read by various authors' stories. These stories are all fundamentally an exploration of what it means to be human and I was particularly moved by Bendelows et al.'s eloquent foreword. This provided an important framing of what would follow in the book, where they introduced the idea held by Baudelot and Establet (2008) that ‘It isn't society that sheds light on suicide, but rather suicide that sheds light on society’ (p. 7). The reader therefore knows early on that this is not an average textbook that will instruct the reader to learn the key facts and figures of suicide, but one which will challenge dominantly held positions and assumptions and help the reader to engage emotionally with people who have been touched by suicide. The book therefore has a desired intention to facilitate an empathic understanding of those who have encountered suicide in its reader.

Appeal · Art · Framing (construction) · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Psychoanalysis · History · Law · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Psychology