ABSTRACT
This chapter considers and explores suicide and suicidality from the perspective of those who have undertaken, considered and attempted it. It highlights the exclusion, rejection and neglect of these perspectives in suicidology, challenging this and attempting to address it. The author writes from such a perspective himself and the chapter is based on the final chapter of his PhD on the subject which he was drawn to write by the failure to acknowledge subjectivity and subjective perspectives in the analysis and discussion of suicide. Bringing together the evidence from his survivor-led analysis of suicide, he offers an alternative to psychiatric ways of thinking about it, which takes account of the ‘social self’ and values subjective and intersubjective lived experience and the knowledge that comes from it. He concludes by seeing the real hope for preventing suicide as lying in a collective, intersubjective response to it, building safe spaces for people to share their first-hand stories to make sense of their lives and to help heal them.
