ABSTRACT
The Suicidal Mind explores how the world appears to persons living under conditions of existential uncertainty and contemplating the question of their own non-being. It attempts to understand how life with a terminal illness, namely HIV/AIDS, is accompanied by intense emotional dilemmas, personal conflicts and different kinds of imagery that often lay beneath people’s observable actions. Suicide, as Staples and Widger (2012) observe, is a subject of enduring human interest that raises fundamental questions about the meaning of life, including people’s most basic relationships with other people and the world. It not only challenges understandings of human nature, culture and moral action but is a broad polythetic category that ranges from highly visible, dramatic acts of sacrifice or martyrdom – such as 9/11 or the recent ‘protest suicides” of self-immolation that sparked the Arab Spring – to the assisted, unmarked and even disguised passing of persons. As such it is not only a philosophical, medical or ethical problem but an anthropological one, and in its broadest sense is:
A project that concerns itself with the kinds of questions that ordinary people ask about themselves and the world. And what greater questions are people faced with than when confronted with the possibility of their own voluntary death, or the chosen death of a person they love? The suicide or attempted suicide of somebody’s lover, child, or friend can be an experience that is impossible to reconcile. (Staples and Widger 2012: 185)
