Suicidality is framed as a problem not only for suicidal people themselves but also for their relatives and the health care professionals working with them. [....] Nonsuicidal people are cast, from a suicidist perspective, as those suffering and affected by suicidality (Hecht 2013). Beattie and Devitt (2015) discuss the impact of suicidality on health care professionals and family, the trauma of suicide for those left behind, and the anger those individuals might experience. Adopting a historical and critical stance on suicidality, Tatz and Tatz (2019, 3) contend that “suicide creates such angst and anger, even hysteria, when compared to homicide and other violent causes of death.”
Without reusing the sexist term hysteria to characterize reactions toward suicidality, I agree with Tatz and Tatz that a strong affective response to suicidality exists, as does a discourse of victim-blaming, even within the social justice model of suicidality. For example, despite the desire to theorize suicidality in a nonpathologizing and nonstigmatizing manner, several authors in the edited volume Critical Suicidology (White et al. 2016a) state that suicides cause collateral damage and harm to others. Some authors use terms such as survivors to refer to the relatives and friends of suicidal people, depicting suicidality as something unthinkable and violent. In anti-oppressive social movements/fields of study, we usually refer to “survivors” of sexual violence, parental mistreatments, war, genocide, forced psychiatric treatments, and so on. Those who “survive” have survived something violent that should not have happened in the first place. I believe that we need to go further in our reflections on the vocabulary we use to describe suicidality and adopt a critical stance toward certain expressions that create the perception that suicidal people are hurting their friends, relatives, health care professionals, and society at large. Blaming the victim has not proven to be a good strategy to help any group navigating difficult experiences. Although suicidality is not currently officially punished or criminalized, forms of moralization are still at work when it comes to the conceptualization of suicidality.
