Relating Suicide

The taboos surrounding suicide run deep. I couldn’t speak about my brother’s death for over a decade. This poignant book creates a space to challenge and rethink our own perceptions of suicide and mental health - both as individuals, and as a society as a whole. * Orlando von Einsiedel, Filmmaker * Weaving personal experience together with extensive research, Relating Suicide bears witness to what it means to live beside suicide. It calls for the need to not only talk more about suicide, but also to listen more to a diversity of voices, and to accommodate for what resides between what we can and cannot know about suicide. This is an absolute must read for students and researchers focusing on the topic of suicide and for those who work in suicide prevention and want to understand suicide in more expansive terms. * Katrina Jaworski, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of South Australia * With her own sister’s death as poignant provocation, Anne Whitehead attends to the materiality of suicide’s aftermath and makes a compelling contribution to the emerging field of critical suicide studies. A watch, a coroner’s court room, a stretch of seaside beach, a memorial bench become the objects and spaces that allow her to sit with the everyday and ongoing presence of suicide without trying to explain or prevent it. Through deeply felt and creative forms of thinking and writing, Whitehead gently but forcefully forges a path for us to relate to suicide rather than turning away from it. -- Ann Cvetkovich, Professor, Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada This is a wonderful book. Entirely original, beautifully written, hugely wide ranging. At last a serious and profound engagement with what comes after suicide: the extraordinary disturbances of time and perception for those remaining; the mundane and often forgotten judicial, religious and cultural processes that have sought to contain and circumscribe an event; the historical and ongoing resonances and effects of stigmatisation. Lyrical, analytic, philosophical and factual, this is also achieves that very difficult feat of being personal without being confessional and of being philosophical and political without relegating the profoundly experiential. -- Pat Waugh, Professor Emeritus, Durham University, UK