Abstract
Suicide research has relied heavily on the psychological autopsy method, which uses interviews with the bereaved to ascertain the mental health status of the deceased prior to death. The resulting data are typically interpreted within a clinical diagnostic framework, which reinforces psychiatric assumptions concerning the ubiquity of mental illness amongst those who take their own lives. The ways in which informants reconstruct the past and the meanings they attach to events preceding the suicide are rarely examined. This paper uses qualitative methods to analyse the narratives given by bereaved people in an English psychological autopsy study, in order to understand how they made sense of a family member’s suicide. Some clear differences between the portrayal of male and female suicides emerged. The paper discusses the gendering of agency and accountability in relation to the differential medicalisation of male and female distress in the UK, and suggests that a preoccupation with mental illness in suicide research may have obscured other culturally normative understandings of self-accomplished death.
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Notes
Exceptions might be publicly performed suicidal acts, such as cases of jumping in daylight from a public site, or recent cases in which individuals have filmed and broadcast their own deaths whilst participating in Internet forums.
This figure is slightly lower than other studies, but this may be accounted for by the fact that individuals who had been in contact with mental health services at the time of death were excluded.
Thirty-four tapes remained untranscribed for the following reasons: interview not taped at informants request (7); tape quality too poor (12); informant provided minimal narrative (9); informant was a medical professional (6).
In contemporary England, many coroners will avoid giving a verdict of suicide if at all possible, in order to spare the family the presumed stigma associated with it.
See Seale (1995) on the “transcendence of shame” in narratives given by relatives and friends of people who died alone.
We claim artistic license in employing the historically popular but now politically incorrect terms “madness” and “mad” to refer to mental illness or those suffering from it. Up until the late nineteenth century, the term madness was freely used in English to denote a condition characterised by abnormal thought and behaviour, being treated in lay parlance as equivalent in meaning to the legal term “insanity”. Its pedigree is reflected in the titles of such classic texts as Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1971), Scull’s Museums of Madness (1979), and Porter’s Madness: A Brief History (2002). We use the terms in the same sense as these authors
We presented others in a previous paper, in which we focused specifically on the ways in which parents account for their sons’ suicides (Owens et al. 2008). We see no conflict between that analysis and this one; different sets of storylines represent different ways of viewing the data, attuning us in turn to different dimensions of the stories.
In referring to the deceased and their kin, we use pseudonyms throughout.
This is compared with 81% of the women.
The title of this section is a reference to a popular situation comedy on English television, although the stories presented here are far from comic. The TV show reinforces the idea that it is socially acceptable for men to indulge in varying degrees of anarchic behaviour, and that in doing so they are simply expressing their masculine identity.
A full discussion of the relationship between possession and madness is outside the scope of this paper. Historically and cross-culturally they have long been regarded as closely related. Whilst the possession states found in non-Western cultures have been widely regarded simply as culturally legitimated and institutionalised forms of mental illness (Lewis 1971), recent anthropological literature on spirit possession generally takes a culturally relativist stance (see Boddy 1994 for a survey of this field). Boddy’s conclusion that possession speaks to us “about morality, kinship, […] history and social memory—the touchstones of social existence” (1994, p. 427) is apposite in the context of this paper.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to our colleagues Jenny Donovan and Keith Lloyd, who collaborated on the qualitative study and assisted with earlier stages of analysis.
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Owens, C., Lambert, H. Mad, Bad or Heroic? Gender, Identity and Accountability in Lay Portrayals of Suicide in Late Twentieth-Century England. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 348–371 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9259-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9259-x