Colucci / Lester Suicide and Culture 2.0

Understanding the Context
2. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-61334-644-0
Verlag: Hogrefe Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Integrating the role of culture is critical in preventing suicide]

Written by leading suicide researchers
Explores suicide in different cultural contexts
Highlights how to conduct culturally sensitive studies

Building on the seminal work of Colucci and Lester (2013), this volume examines the unique perspective of the role culture plays in suicide research and prevention. With the current domination of individual and largely biomedical approaches in the field, these leading social scientists and suicide researchers carefully show how important integrating sociocultural factors is in helping to prevent people from dying by suicide and support those who live with suicidality.
The first section addresses the fundamental issues of why “culture” is of vital importance in understanding and preventing suicidal behavior, what the “cultural meaning” of suicide is, and where current research and theory are taking us. It concludes with a thought-provoking perspective on suicide as a staged performance. The second section features a mixed-methods cross-cultural study on the meanings of suicide in Australian, Indian, and Italian cultures. Additional chapters explore a culturally specific form of suicide (i.e., sati in India), suicide among Roma and Irish Travellers, and a community-based suicide prevention strategy for different populations, including migrants and refugees and people from low-and-middle-income Asian countries. The authors conclude with insightful recommendations for conducting culturally sensitive and meaningful studies.
This volume is essential reading for anyone involved in suicide research and prevention and more broadly to those interested in the sociocultural and political contexts of mental health.

Zielgruppe

Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, researchers, epidemiologists, policy makers and students

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colucci, Erminia

Lester, David

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Forschungsmethodik, Wissenschaftliche Ausstattung
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete Psychiatrie, Sozialpsychiatrie, Suchttherapie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie Psychopathologie

Leseproben

|3|Chapter 1 Sociocultural Context of Suicidal Behavior – Its Importance and Neglect

Erminia Colucci

No one who kills himself does so without reference to the prevailing normative standards, values and attitudes of the culture to which he belongs.

Boldt (1988)

Although prevention efforts have improved, suicide remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide (World Health Organization [WHO], 2021). Every year, more people die as a result of suicide than of HIV infection, malaria, or breast cancer, or even war and homicide. While suicidal behaviors are present in every country, there are dramatic variations. The epidemiological differences between countries in the rates of suicide have led to research on the factors that predispose people in these countries to an increased risk of suicide. Few of these studies have addressed culture or ethnicity as an important dimension that might impact an individual’s decision to take their own life. This missing area in suicidology has been noted by many scholars for some time, including Hjelmeland and Knizek (2011), De Leo (2002), Eskin (1999), Kral (1998), Leenaars et al. (2003), Shiang (2000), Tortolero and Roberts (2001), and Trovato (1986). In particular, we still have little understanding of the variation of a key aspect of suicide, hypothesized by various authors as differing across cultures – namely, the meaning(s) of suicide (Boldt, 1988; Douglas, 1967; Farberow, 1975; Leenaars et al., 1997; Lester, 1997).

However, recent advancements in suicide research have significantly broadened our understanding of the complex interplay between cultural factors and suicidal behavior. Since Suicide and culture: Understanding the context (Colucci & Lester, 2013), a growing body of literature has emphasized the need to consider cultural variations, socioeconomic factors, and minority stressors as pivotal elements in understanding and preventing suicide, while challenging the “biologization” or “psychiatrization” of suicide (e.g., Hjelmeland et al., 2019).

This chapter, partially based on Colucci (2006), opens with a discussion of how culture is a central but highly debated concept in suicidology. In spite of the difficulty in studying this construct, scholars have recognized the relevance of cul|4|ture and ethnicity for understanding suicidal behavior. Particular attention has been given to the importance and necessity of understanding the cultural meanings of suicide rather than taking for granted that the meanings, interpretations, and mental representations of suicidal behavior remain the same in different cultural and subcultural contexts. After this, I will underline the need to establish culturally sensitive prevention strategies. The chapter concludes by providing suggestions for future research on the sociocultural (and political) contexts of suicidal behavior.

The Concept of Culture

The concept of culture is probably one of the most debated in any of the disciplines that have dealt with it, and there is very little agreement on its definition. Already in the 1950s Kroeber and Kluckholm (1952) reviewed more than one hundred definitions of “culture,” and there was little agreement between scholars; at best, the various definitions could be grouped into categorical types. Sixty years later, the term “culture” still does not have an unequivocal interpretation.

Marsella et al. (2000) proposed a definition of culture as:

Shared acquired patterns of behavior and meanings that are constructed and transmitted within social-life contexts for the purposes of promoting individual and group survival, adaptation, and adjustment. These shared patterns are dynamic in nature (i.e., continuously subject to change and revision) and can become dysfunctional. (p. 50)

The authors noted that culture is represented both externally and internally: externally in artifacts, roles, activity context, and institutions, and internally in worldviews, identities, meanings, values, attitudes, epistemologies, consciousness patterns, cognitive, somatic and affective processes, and the concept of self and personhood.

Other scholars have included in the definition of culture aspects of the manmade environment. For example, Al-Issa (1982) observed:

Culture … consists of the beliefs, values, norms, and myths that are shared by the group and symbolically transmitted to its members, as well as the physical environment, which is comprised of artifacts like roads, bridges, and buildings that are handed down from one generation to another. (p. 3)

Barrett (2001), after emphasizing that culture is very often taken to mean a set of qualities of those “who are not us,” noted that culture, like biology, is a fundamental precondition of human existence, and culture mediates all |5|human interactions. An important concept present in Barrett’s definition of culture is the centrality of the individual:

Culture, although it refers to ideas and beliefs held in common by a group of people, is mediated by and manifested within individuals. One’s culture becomes incorporated into one’s personality, into one’s fundamental way of “being-in-the-world.” (Barrett, 2001, p. 7)

What authors such as Barrett point out is that the individual, endowed with self-reflection, critical abilities, and creative imagination, is capable of evaluating predominant norms, values, and social expectations and, therefore, can contemplate alternative meanings. Thus, “culture” is not an ontological reality that we simply acquire or inherit by being born into a certain setting, but a system of beliefs, norms, values, and attitudes that are constantly construed, interpreted, and (re)negotiated. As such, culture cannot be reified, operationalized, or measured as a static dimension (which partially explains the difficulty in studying “”it and, therefore, the scarce attention paid to this construct in suicidology and other mental health disciplines). This was recognized by Tseng (2001) who noted that “rather than a static set of ideas, beliefs, values and perspectives on the world, culture can be negotiated or contested” (p. 24).

There is often the presence of several value systems operating at one time within any cultural community, as underlined also by Boldt (1988) and Eckersley and Dear (2002). These latter authors have stated this as follows:

This is not to argue that cultures are monolithic, exerting a uniform effect on everyone, regardless of gender, class and ethnicity; nor that individuals are cultural sponges, passively absorbing cultural in?uences rather than interacting actively with them; nor that there is [sic] not a variety of subcultures marked by sometimes very different values, meanings, and beliefs. (Eckersley & Dear, 2002, p. 1892)

As is clear, even if culture has been recognized by many scholars and various disciplines as a central aspect of human life, the problem in the study of culture is mainly a problem of interpretation from two perspectives: from one side, the interpretation of what culture “is” and, from the other side, people’s individual interpretation of their own cultures.

This is especially apparent in the study of the cultural aspects of suicide where our understanding is made particularly difficult by the complexity of the phenomenon and the difficulty in gaining direct access to the subjects under study (or impossibility when they are indeed deceased). The former problem was addressed by Kral (1998) who noted that “suicide, like everything else that is complexly human, takes place in a powerful social context” (p. 221).

|6|Relevance of Culture for Suicidal Behavior

Overall, the suicide rates of different countries tend to be relatively stable over time and very different from one another. For example, Lester (1987) found that suicide rates of European countries in 1975 were strongly associated with the suicide rates of those countries 100 years earlier. Some studies...