Living Life in the Face of Death: An Ethnographic Exploration of Healing, Temporality, and Connection in Suicide
| dc.contributor.advisor | Allison, Anne | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Rosenblatt, Adam | |
| dc.contributor.author | Sperber, Benjamin | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-04-24T13:41:04Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-04-24T13:41:04Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.department | Cultural Anthropology | |
| dc.department | Program II | |
| dc.description.abstract | Suicidality is a visceral, frightening reality that many with mental illness face on a daily basis. Treated with contempt in society, much of the scholarship surrounding suicidality focuses on the family or the effectiveness of treatment options. This thesis represents an effort to hold space for those who suffer from suicidality. Through ethnographic research on reddit and through semi-structured interviews with those who have been involuntarily committed in the state of North Carolina, the author offers a new analysis of the contingencies of healing, time, and connection for those who fail in their aimed desire of death through suicide. Split into three chapters, the author first examines how western biomedicine and the telos of medicine (i.e., treating to cure) necessarily is complicated by mental illness, leaving those who experience suicidality to feel that they are incapable of healing. Moreover, the author undertakes an exploration of differing tropes within biomedicine in an attempt to shed light on how dominant notions of healing are confounded or complicated by suicidality. In Chapter Two, the author explores time; namely, how suicidality subverts productivity-centered, future-oriented understandings and experiences of time. To this end, the author poses a new temporal schema, suicidal temporality, which seeks to explain how those who fail at suicide attempts experience time, the accumulation of life stressors, administrative labor, and more. In the final chapter, the author explores two forms of relationships—those between patient and physician, as well as those between suicidal individuals—to demonstrate how differing contexts can afford or limit a suicidal person varying levels of connection, trust, and aid from their interlocutor. Offering no solutions to eradicate suicidality, the author instead hopes to allow readers to gain a greater understanding of the experiences, emotions, and sensorial experiences that accompany suicidality. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | ||
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.rights.uri | ||
| dc.subject | Suicide | |
| dc.subject | Death | |
| dc.subject | Healing | |
| dc.subject | biomedicine | |
| dc.subject | Time | |
| dc.subject | Relationships | |
| dc.title | Living Life in the Face of Death: An Ethnographic Exploration of Healing, Temporality, and Connection in Suicide | |
| dc.type | Honors thesis |
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