ABSTRACT
Lester observed that the "communicative aspects of suicide have certainly been implied in suicide research". This chapter offers a brief sketch of the questions raised by a cultural anthropological approach to understanding the motives of suicide set forth by Kral and Kral and Dyck. It focuses on this by introducing a dialogical and dramatic communicative perspective on both the motive of suicide and the ideation of suicide. In his article, "Suicide as Social Logic," Kral extends Shneidman's theoretical approach to suicidal motivation. Shneidman argued that the common stimulus for suicide is unendurable psychological pain, pain a person is "seeking to escape". For Shneidman, lethality referred to a scalable degree of "risk to rescue ratio" inherent in any chosen method of suicide. Lethality refers to the deadliness of methods chosen for suicide. By understanding the dialogical dimension of communication, one can explore the concept of "audience" as a way of illuminating the performative aspects of suicide motivation and ideation.
