ABSTRACT
Much of what we know about suicide, today in the west, is informed by the scholarly field of suicidology. Bringing the concept of “styles of reasoning” to bear on suicidology, this chapter explores how the foundational methodological and epistemological assumptions held by suicidologists – that suicide is a stable and knowable phenomenon, that quantitative methods are the best way to study suicide, and that suicide is the outcome of mental illness – have come to be accepted and sustained as the truth of suicide, and how the mental illness model of suicide is key to sustaining prevention as the best response to suicide. In doing so, the chapter shows that suicidology's position as the authority on the topic of suicide is secured through the ways in which it shapes the subjectivity of the suicidal person as mentally ill, the subjectivity of the expert suicide researcher as working in the psy-sciences, and the subject of suicide as intrinsically related to psychopathology in mutually constitutive ways.
