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2024
Blog available at: https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/2024/01/08/suicidism/ Excerpted from Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide, by Alexandre Baril. Used by permission of Temple University Press. © 2023 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved. The book can be purchased and an open-access edition can be found at this link: https://tupress.temple.edu/books/undoing-suicidism
Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide
Online book launch: Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide2023 •
Online book launch: Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide by Alexandre Baril Date: Friday, May 26, 2023 Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) On Zoom (please see link below and on the attached poster to register) Free event in English with auto-generated captions for accessibility. The event will consist of a conversation with Dr. Ally Day about my book, followed by a Q&A period with the audience. To register, please click on the following link: https://uottawa-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vceyuqzwuEtWcprnhFbgR65hCFeFR56ie You may pre-order it or read the book's description here: https://tupress.temple.edu/books/undoing-suicidism ***Promotional code UNS23 for 25% discount.***
DSQ: Disability Studies Quarterly
Suicidism: A new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective (DSQ: Disability Studies Quarterly, 2020)2020 •
Anchored in queer and crip perspectives, this essay proposes the neologism "suicidism" as a new theoretical framework to conceptualize the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence. The thesis proposed here is that suicidal people suffer both individually and collectively from suicidist violence, an oppression that remains unproblematized in all current interpretations of suicide, including those taken up by anti-oppressive scholars and activists. I pursue three interrelated objectives: 1) interrogate dominant ideas and perspectives on suicidality; 2) make visible and denounce the power relations between suicidal and non-suicidal people; 3) enrich intersectional analyses by naming and problematizing an oppression that has been neglected. In sum, this essay proposes to analyze suicidality by asking the following epistemological questions: What and who is missing from current conceptualizations of suicide? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicide, from queer and crip perspectives, help anti-oppressive scholars and activists avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people? This essay is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the predominant models of suicide to illustrate how they all arrive at the same conclusion-that suicide is never an option-and how this results in a silencing of suicidal subjects. In so doing, I also demonstrate how suicidism is intertwined in forms of ableism/sanism. I conclude this first part by mobilizing the notion of epistemic injustice to theorize both the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by suicidal subjects. In the second part, I explore additional interpretations of suicide that contrast with the dominant "negative" conceptualizations that seek to prevent it in all circumstances. I demonstrate how even "positive" perspectives of suicidality (e.g. the libertarian position) are founded in forms of ableism/sanism, and that even though they may critique the marginalization of suicidal subjects, they don't conceptualize their oppression as systemic, nor address it from an anti-oppressive perspective. Critiquing the "positive" conceptualizations of suicide allows me to delineate an alternative conceptualization of suicide rooted in queer and crip perspectives. Mobilizing a queer perspective to study suicide doesn't mean offering only analyses that take queer theories as a starting point or queer communities as the objects of the study. The intention is rather to queer suicide in a more holistic sense, that is, by applying queering and cripping methods, theories, epistemologies and prevention strategies to the topic of suicidality. Based on a harm-reduction and a non-coercive suicide approach, I suggest that assisted suicide should be a possibility for suicidal people, a position that relies on an ethics of living and a responsibility toward suicidal people. KEYWORDS: suicidal people, suicide, suicidism, models to theorize suicide, stigmatisation, ableism/sanism, anti-oppressive perspective, epistemic injustice, critical suicidology
2023 •
Interview available at: https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-social-sciences/news-all/suicide-prevention-uottawa-researcher-proposes-assisted-dying-model-transform-prevention Interview with Alexandre Baril about his new book: Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide. AVAILABLE AT: https://temple.manifoldapp.org/projects/undoing-suicidism
2022 •
Throughout the history of Western thought, suicide has been conceptualized in three primary domains: Morality (suicide as honor or sin), Criminality (suicide as crime), and Science (suicide as medical problem). Today, most major medical entities acknowledge that a combination of individual, genetic, relational, community, and societal factors contribute to the risk of suicide. Though this biopsychosocial model has opened doors for more compassionate and holistic psychiatric care, it ultimately relies on the oppressive framing of suicidal people as inherently incapable of understanding their own realities and making their own healthcare decisions. Building on Alexandre Baril’s concept of “suicidism,” which names this oppression, this dissertation attends to the epistemic violence inherent in extant theorizations of suicidality and mental healthcare. Using iterative narrative analysis and disability justice frameworks, I unpack 140 narratives shared by suicide attempt survivors about their experiences in order to pursue three interrelated aims: (1) tracing the historical rhetorics that produced contemporary suicidism; (2) fleshing out the concept of suicidism and its communicative components, which I theorize as “compulsory vivation”; and (3) theorizing how suicidism can be circumnavigated in order to create alternate forms of care, communication, and healing that help suicidal people live well with the desire to die.
2016 •
Traditional ways of understanding and preventing suicide are not working for everyone. In Critical Suicidology, a team of international scholars, practitioners, and people directly affected by suicide argue that the field of suicidology has become too focused on the biomedical paradigm: a model that pathologizes distress and obscures the social, political, and historical contexts that contribute to human suffering. The authors take a critical look at existing research, introduce the perspectives of those who have direct personal knowledge of suicide and suicidal behaviour, and propose alternative approaches that are creative and culturally sensitive. In the right hands, this book could save lives.
Suicidology is at a crossroads, the crux of which came into plain view recently when Hjelmeland/Knizek's critique of mainstream suicidology was followed by two ardent essays defending suicidology as it currently exists. We stake out a middle-way approach leveraging sociology's unique disciplinary perspective to bridge the two sides to construct a robust transdisciplinary toolbox that helps suicidology advance as science and improve how we study suicide and, therefore, what we know. The essay first examines the underlying structural and cultural reasons for the talking past each other, before turning towards our own understanding of science, methods, and the study of suicide.
Suicide is a socio-cultural phenomenon. Reports about suicide from different cultures and eras support the opinion that suicide can be a cultivated and normatively recognized act. International educated and scientific use of the term suicide produces, conveys and suggests a narrowing of reflection. A medical deficit viewpoint has been established, and corresponding theories constructed and ‘verified’ to justify the paternalistic interaction with suicidal people. The suicidal person is discriminated and isolated on multiple levels in the suicide development process. Psychological autopsy studies are driven by deficit- and illness-based approaches and are designed and conducted on a low methodological level. When suicidal actions are recognized as normal actions, or even interpreted as morally sound, medical, political, religious and other guardians of morality and the ruling order oppose such understanding and demand sovereignty of interpretation. The conflicts in the suicide field result from diverging values and interests, whereby open, controversial and empirically-based public discussions are generally avoided. There is a lack of reference in psychiatric and suicidology texts to the fact that ‘free will’, ‘free choice’ or ‘free mind’ in modern society are not restricted primarily by mental illness, but by socio-economic disadvantage and economic and political decisions that lead, among other things, to mental disorders. Cultivation of suicide is not in contradiction with prevention of suicide.
Suicidology Online
Review of Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood and Power, edited by Ludek Broz and Daniel Münster2019 •
2014 •
Suicide and poor mental health outcomes remains the most significant health challenge for the LGBTI community in Australia. The authors seeks to make sense of the appalling suicide statistics by locating them beside a series of discontinuous, personal narratives. They have used a combined corporate and individual first-person 'feminine' voice to explore the personal impact of suicide, the context in which it occurs—through the associated determinants of health, differing perspectives of community subgroups, and current methodologies of understanding—along with possible solutions for containment. Ultimately the authors claim a safe space where the issues that suicide and mental health present in the LGBTI community can be interrogated and challenged, through greater access to and connection with the individual narratives, and current health-based research seeking to make sense them.
2021 •
This study analyzes how social groups with nonheteronormative sexualities are often associated with suicide and posits some consequences of this association in academic and social contexts. This reflection contributes to a necessary conversation that extends beyond the theoretical positions of researchers and has a social effect. In this paper I highlight some of the experienced effects produced by the association between suicide and sexual diversity by acknowledging how sexuality assumes a specific social meaning. The article is divided into four sections. In the first two, I analyze how the notion of epidemiological risk becomes an identity trait in populations with non-heteronormative sexualities. In the third section, I reflect on academic research regarding the association between gender and suicide. The last section presents a proposal for interpreting suicidal behavior from a gender perspective that problematizes the affective and political meaning of the association.
2001 •
2015 •
2022 •
arXiv (Cornell University)
Nanoscale intracellular mass-density alteration as a signature of the effect of alcohol on early carcinogenesis: A transmission electron microscopy (TEM) study2015 •
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Strength plus Endurance Training and Individualized Diet Reduce Fat Mass in Overweight Subjects: A Randomized Clinical Trial2020 •
Genes & development
RB localizes to DNA double-strand breaks and promotes DNA end resection and homologous recombination through the recruitment of BRG12016 •
Revista Didatica Sistemica
Meio ambiente como tema transversal na 5ª série do ensino Fundamental (Salvador – BA): um estudo de caso2010 •
Social Science Research Network
An Exact Test of the Improvement of the Minimum Variance Portfolio2023 •