Critical Suicide Notes: On Witnessing and Prefigurative Politics

Abstract

This paper reimagines the study of suicide as a critical, relational practice rooted in solidarity and transformative possibilities. Moving beyond the limitations of conventional suicidology, this work emphasizes the importance of attending to the broader social, political, and structural contexts that shape experiences of suicidality. By framing this work as a collection of “notes,” this paper calls for an approach that notices, marks, and responds to both the violence and resistance inherent in these experiences. This paper introduces witnessing, dreaming, and prefiguration as key methodologies for Critical Suicide Studies. Witnessing is conceptualized as an active and relational practice that centers on the lived realities of those affected by suicide, making their stories and the systems of harm that often go unaddressed, visible. Dreaming involves imagining futures beyond survival, where care and justice guide collective responses. Prefiguration focuses on enacting these futures in the present, embedding relational and community-based approaches in the everyday practices of suicide care and research. Through these practices, this paper explores how Critical Suicide Studies can move from critique to action, creating conditions in which responses to suicide are life-affirming, relational, and grounded in mutual care. This work aspires to cultivate spaces for collective healing, dignity and transformative change.

1. Introduction: Reflecting with Ordinary Notes and Sweaty Concepts

In Christina Sharpe’s (2023) Ordinary Notes, she opens with a series of definitions of the word note that orient us toward care, attention, and meaning-making in a world shaped by violence and loss. She writes:

Note:

Verb: to notice or observe with care; to notice, observe, and related senses.

Transitive verb: to take notice of; to consider or study carefully; to pay attention to; to mark. Noun: a symbol, character, or mark used in writing, printing, etc.

Noun: a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts written down as an aid to memory.

Noun: tone, call, sound; a particular quality or tone that reflects or expresses a mood or attitude.

Verb: to make, or have the effect of, a note.

Noun: a single tone of definite pitch made by a musical instrument or the human voice. (p. 1).

In suicide research, the note has conventionally taken on a limited and often negative meaning, most often associated with the final messages left by those who have died. These suicide notes are frequently pathologized and instrumentalized, studied primarily as evidentiary artifacts rather than as complex expressions and invitations to bear witness to personal and social struggles. Sharpe’s definitions invite a broader perspective, allowing us to consider the multiple resonances of a note—not only as a record of facts or as an expression of sound but as a way of attending to the world, marking what might otherwise be forgotten or silenced. This spacious multiplicity of meanings invites us to consider Critical Suicide Studies, which is an emergent, unstable, contested site of practice, research, and activism, as a collection of notes—an archive of noticing, observing, and marking how suicide exists within a world shaped by structural violence.

How, then, might Critical Suicide Studies take note of the lives and deaths of those affected by suicide? How might it mark the unseen violence—epistemic, material, and otherwise—that shapes our understanding of suicide? Crucially, how might it not only observe but make a new kind of note, one that expresses a different mood, a different tone, one that reflects the potential for worlds otherwise?

The concept of note also calls us to think of our work as fragmentary, ongoing, and open to revision. Sharpe’s (2023) definition of a note as “a brief record… written down as an aid to memory” (p. 1) suggests that what we write is never final but is part of a larger project of memory and meaning-making. This resonates with Sara Ahmed’s (2014) idea of “sweaty concepts”—those concepts that emerge from the difficulties of lived experience, from inhabiting bodies that are “not at home in the world.” Ahmed describes sweaty concepts as those generated in the effort to describe difficult, embodied realities. How might the concepts of Critical Suicide Studies—those we engage with as scholars and practitioners—also be sweaty? How does the work of Critical Suicide Studies emerge from the lived experiences of those affected by suicide and those who feel the weight of structural violence, systemic abandonment, and social inequities? How do these concepts challenge us to stay with the discomfort of that reality rather than seeking to tidy it up or resolve it too quickly?

In this paper, we address this challenge by foregrounding three interwoven modes of engagement: witnessing, dreaming, and prefiguration. Through these, we offer notes toward a relational, justice-oriented approach to suicide that resists the dominant logic of suicidology. Rather than reducing suicide to risk factors or biomedical paradigms, we explore how witnessing makes visible the violence and resistance shaping suicide, how dreaming expands possibilities for alternative futures, and how prefiguration actualizes those futures in the present. These approaches unsettle suicidology’s dominant epistemologies and offer new trajectories for Critical Suicide Studies as an ethical and political practice.

In naming this paper Critical Suicide Notes, we orient ourselves toward the dual tasks of noting what Critical Suicide Studies is and what it might become. As scholars, practitioners, and people whose lived experiences are deeply entangled with the realities of suicide, we are directly implicated in this evolving conversation. We also acknowledge that writing from our respective social locations as an Indigenous scholar (JA) and a white settler scholar (JW), both of whom occupy positions of privilege as university researchers, creates certain tensions.

For example, the authorial “we” is always fraught; the strategic amplification of Black, Indigenous, and feminist voices risks being read as appropriation or performative, especially in the specific context of Critical Suicide Studies, which has been overwhelmingly white, Euro-Western, and Anglo-centric. At the same time, our collaboration offers a distinct opportunity to situate this discussion in a new starting place—one that foregrounds questions of power, domination, silence, and erasure while also recognizing our own complicity.

Throughout our writing process, we have continually grappled with questions such as: What might be possible when we actively seek to interrupt the whiteness of Critical Suicide Studies? How can we critique and contribute to the development of the field? How might Critical Suicide Studies meaningfully engage with the intellectual traditions, lived experiences, and political struggles of those most impacted by colonialism, racial violence, and structural abandonment? Crucially, who is best positioned—both effectively and ethically—to carry this work forward?

Our work is punctuated by increasingly complex social, political, economic, and environmental challenges, such as climate change, wars, and intensifying inequities. As colleagues working in suicide research and therapeutic spaces in Canada, we have often noted the varied ways these realities have shaped fraught discourses surrounding youth suicide, death by drug poisoning, and, more recently, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). This work has also meant bearing witness to multiple forms of racism, settler colonialism, and genocide, most glaringly in Palestine. These realities compel us to rethink not only our approach to critical studies of suicide but also our imagination of this project, our vocation, and life itself within contexts shaped by persistent intersecting forms of harm.

Our work calls for active relational responsibility to make visible the lives, deaths, and stories silenced by oppressive systems. In this, witnessing is not passive; it demands that we confront the structures of violence that shape both suicide and its study. At the same time, we emphasize the importance of engaging with prefiguration, of asking what futures our work, however “sweaty” the conceptual labor may be, might help bring into being. What new approaches to studying and responding to suicide might emerge if we center on plural visions of justice, solidarity, and relationality? How might these humble Critical Suicide Notes disrupt the prevailing logics that persistently shape suicidology? What would it mean to live in a world where responses to suicide go beyond prevention—expanding toward creating conditions in which all people can live with dignity and hope? How might Critical Suicide Studies contribute to imagining and building these worlds, even as we bear witness to the enduring violence of the present?

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. On Witnessing

There are many accounts of witnessing as a methodological approach, spanning disciplines from critical legal studies to trauma studies and decolonial research. However, we draw on Sarah Hunt’s (2014, 2018) theorization of witnessing because of her trenchant Indigenous feminist perspective—one that remains accountable to the interlocking violence of colonialism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Treating witnessing not as a detached act of observation but as a relational and political practice, Hunt grounds her approach in Kwagiulth legal traditions, emphasizing that witnessing carries obligations: “a methodology in which we are obligated through a set of relational responsibilities to ensure frameworks of representation that allow for the lives we have witnessed to be made visible” (Hunt 2014, p. 36). Through witnessing, she argues that stories must be “not denied, ignored, or silenced” (p. 37).

Situating witnessing within Indigenous feminist methodologies, Hunt developed her approach in response to the violence affecting Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, queer, and trans people—violence that is physical, social, environmental, and political. We extend this framework to Critical Suicide Studies with an awareness that this field, too, is shaped by the very conditions it seeks to name: a space of scholarship and activism that navigates life and death under oppressive social structures. Suicide does not exist apart from colonial, racial, and gendered violence, and Critical Suicide Studies, as both a scholarly and activist space, must recognize its own embeddedness in these realities.

Rather than positioning survivors’ experiences and academic inquiry as parallel, we argue that Critical Suicide Studies must be understood as a collective: “a movement of researchers, practitioners, and activists” (Critical Suicide Studies Network Working Group 2019, para. 2, line 3) committed to “a future where relational, strengths-based, culturally responsive, and social justice-oriented approaches to understanding, caring about, and transforming the world come to prevail” (White et al. 2016, p. 10). However, witnessing is not a neutral act; it carries an obligation. If Critical Suicide Studies are to bear witness to suicide, they must also bear witness to their own practices of knowledge production—interrogating whose voices are centered, marginalized, or excluded.

2.2. The Political Stakes of Witnessing

Witnessing cannot be extracted, standardized, or made procedurally “applicable” across institutional contexts without distorting its ethical commitments. Rendering witnessing a neutral tool risks transforming it from an act of accountability into an institutionalized gesture that leaves oppressive structures intact. Hunt (2014, 2018) emphasizes that witnessing is not a methodological procedure but a relational responsibility that is always situated within histories of violence and struggles over who is permitted to be heard, grieved, and recognized. “The right to be heard,” she reminds us, “is not evenly distributed,” as colonial institutions have long determined whose suffering counts and whose deaths are rendered unintelligible (Hunt 2014, p. 33).

This presents a critical tension: how do we ensure that witnessing remains accountable to those most impacted by systemic and epistemic violence, rather than becoming an institutional mechanism that reabsorbs critique without substantive change? For many communities, witnessing already takes place outside of professionalized systems—in mutual aid networks, survivor-led initiatives, land-based healing, and abolitionist responses to suicide. These are not mere “applications” of witnessing but lived expressions grounded in the conditions that conventional suicide prevention frameworks often obscure. If witnessing is to enter institutional spaces, it must do so as a practice of disruption rather than seamless integration, recognizing that institutional uptake often comes at the cost of depoliticization.

2.3. Critical Suicide Studies as a Movement of Witnessing

Witnessing enables us to recognize that those engaged in Critical Suicide Studies are “acting as witnesses to the lives and deaths of [our] relations, community members, and friends” (Hunt 2014, p. 40), and often to our own experiences of suicidality. This fundamentally shifts how we study, experience, and respond to suicide, positioning Critical Suicide Studies as more than a disciplinary field. It is an embodied, activist, and reflexive practice that remains alert to its own potential complicities—whether in the knowledge it produces, the interventions it endorses, or the epistemic erasures it risks perpetuating.

Understanding Critical Suicide Studies as a commitment to witnessing makes clear that it is not merely a scholarly pursuit but a social, political, and ethical practice—“an affective mode of engagement that involves the whole body and relations with others” (Costa and White 2024, p. 10). It also requires witnessing how communities—many abandoned by the state and other institutions—enact collective survival and resistance, illuminating “the multiple and often decentralized forms of community and collective care that stand to interrupt age-old patterns determining who is able to live and who is left to die” (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 73).

Unlike Western juridical notions of witnessing, where “witnesses are called upon to give evidence of ‘truth’ in a ‘fact-finding’ mission” (Hunt 2014, p. 42), we approach witnessing as more than “hearing, seeing, or being told something” (p. 42). It is an active, relational engagement embedded within “intimate network[s] of relations” (p. 52) and shared experiences. Some of these connections—such as those linking a small, diverse group of people in a growing transnational Critical Suicide Studies network—are shaped by resonant ethical commitments and by shared questions arising from the contested politics of knowledge and power (Chandler and Wright 2024; Fitzpatrick 2020; Jaworski 2020; Marsh et al. 2022; Mills 2018; Tack 2021).

Grounding our work in the felt impacts of violence, as Hunt (2018) reminds us, demands that our understanding remains accountable to those most affected by structural and social harm. Witnessing carries an obligation to act, particularly in the face of violence that is normalized or invisibilized. In Critical Suicide Studies, this means navigating complex power dynamics and contested understandings, ensuring that our commitments translate into material responsibility to the communities we engage with.

2.4. Challenging the Foundations of Suicidology

One dimension of this responsibility involves narrating the emergence of Critical Suicide Studies as a dissident voice against the practices and priorities of the broader dominant field of suicidology, challenging its narrow focus and methodological limitations. This divergence is complex, representing not only a methodological fracture but also a critique of the underlying assumptions guiding suicidology research.

While Critical Suicide Studies critiques the dominant paradigms of suicidology, it does not position itself as wholly distinct from all existing critical approaches to suicide. Many scholars within Critical Suicide Studies engage with resonant fields such as community psychology, cultural and social psychiatry, critical public health, disability studies, antipsychiatry, and critical fields, drawing on their insights while also expanding the terrain of inquiry through relational, political, and decolonial perspectives. The genealogy witnessed here reflects one such trajectory, rather than asserting a singular or novel break from these traditions.

Historically, suicide has been framed through moral, religious, and theological discourses, with explanations rooted in individual sin, immorality, and divine judgment. The emergence of sociology in the late 19th century marked a shift toward social explanations for suicide. Suicide (Durkheim 1897) was among the first to apply empirical methods to the sociological study of suicide, challenging individualistic and moral interpretations by emphasizing social structures and collective factors (Fitzpatrick et al. 2015). His work represented a departure from explanations that framed suicide solely as a failure of personal morality, proposing instead that suicide rates were shaped by the degree of social integration and regulation within a given society.

However, while Durkheim’s work moved suicidology beyond purely theological explanations, it also reinforced a Eurocentric framing that privileged specific forms of knowledge production. In Suicide (Durkheim 1897), Durkheim focused primarily on European societies but was grounded in a broader sociological framework that, as seen in The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim 1893) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1912), was deeply entangled with colonial ethnography and racialized classifications of social evolution. His analysis positioned so-called “primitive societies” as exemplifying mechanical solidarity, contrasting them with modern industrial societies, which he argued exhibited greater complexity but also higher rates of anomic suicides. Although Durkheim’s model challenged purely individualist views of suicide, his broader sociological project reinscribed colonial hierarchies, reinforcing a vision of social progress that cast certain societies as “advanced” in their ability to prevent self-destruction while others were framed as deficient. This has had a lasting effect on suicidology, shaping the field’s epistemic foundations and positioning Western industrialized societies as the primary locus of knowledge production on suicide while rendering Indigenous and non-Western conceptualizations marginal or illegible.

As suicidology was formalized in the mid-20th century, it increasingly aligned with biomedical, psychiatric, and public health models. Edwin Shneidman was pivotal in this shift, defining suicidology as a field concerned primarily with psychological pain and suicide prevention (Shneidman 1993). His work recasts suicide as an issue of mental distress, rather than social or structural conditions. While this helped institutionalize suicide prevention as a public health priority, it also reinforced epistemic gatekeeping by privileging positivist methods over alternative frameworks. As a result, suicidology has consolidated around clinical intervention and risk factor analysis, sidelining structural, cultural, and historical perspectives.

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, suicidology’s focus on individual risk assessment intensified with predictive frameworks like Thomas Joiner’s (2005) Interpersonal Theory of Suicide and Klonsky and May’s Three-Step Theory of Suicide (2015). Joiner conceptualizes suicide as emerging from thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and an acquired capacity for self-harm. While his model refines risk prediction by emphasizing interpersonal and psychological distress, it exemplifies suicidology’s preoccupation with individual-level explanations, neglecting how racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and social abandonment shape suicidality. Klonsky and May’s Three-Step Theory builds on Joiner’s work by distinguishing between suicidal ideation, planning, and action (Klonsky and May 2015). While it advances clinical predictions, it remains entrenched within a biomedical and behavioral framework, focusing on individual distress while omitting structural and historical considerations.

Although these models have provided useful clinical tools, their emphasis on proximate causes obscures the broader systemic forces that render certain populations more vulnerable to suicide. They reflect suicidology’s continued reliance on predictive and interventionist approaches rather than interrogating the conditions that make suicide both thinkable and livable.

2.5. The Epistemic Narrowing of Suicidology

As we witness, the formalization of suicidology was not a neutral process of scientific advancement but a narrowing of epistemic possibilities. As quantitative and predictive approaches became dominant, alternative methodologies—qualitative, critical, and community-based—were dismissed as anecdotal or unscientific (Jaworski 2020). This privileging of measurable risk factors over lived experiences, sociopolitical structures, and historical conditions has profoundly shaped the concept of valid knowledge in the field.

Jaworski (2020) argues that suicidology’s positivist turn not only determines what is studied but also establishes epistemic boundaries that constrain the questions that can even be asked. By adhering to deterministic, predictive models, the field centers easily quantifiable data while marginalizing approaches that engage with the narrative, cultural, or political dimensions of suicide. Drawing on Butler’s (2009) concept of a “field of intelligibility,” Jaworski (2020) contends that suicidology’s methodological gatekeeping dictates what counts as legitimate knowledge—spotlighting some perspectives while rendering others invisible.

This epistemological bias extends to suicide prevention logic, where interventions are framed through individualized, medicalized paradigms. Critiquing Joiner (2011), White (2012) highlights how suicidology’s “narrowly defined conceptualization of scientific rigor” (p. 48) often fails to capture suicide’s complexity. Marsh (2016) further argues that it “often fails to provide a deep appreciation or sufficient understanding of the fluctuating, historically contingent, and relationally constructed nature of suicide” (p. 21). Risk factor modeling and psychological autopsies dominate, sidelining qualitative research that explores subjective experiences, cultural contexts, and sociopolitical dynamics (Hjelmeland 2016).

Feminist critiques have long exposed suicidology’s over-reliance on cause-effect reasoning and its privileging of quantitative methods at the expense of relational, interpretive, and structural approaches (Range and Leach 1998). Since then, critical, feminist, queer, crip, Mad, arts-based, and Indigenous scholars (Ansloos 2018, 2023; Ansloos and Peltier 2022; Baril 2023; Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998; Canetto 2008; Cover 2013, 2016a, 2016b; Colucci and Lester 2012; Colucci and Martin 2008; Colucci et al. 2017; Jaworski 2010a, 2010b, 2016, 2022; Mills 2018; Rowe and Ansloos 2024; Tack 2021) have expanded these critiques, arguing that suicidology must account for suicide’s embeddedness within broader systems of violence, inequity, and abandonment (Reynolds 2016; Button and Marsh 2019). These scholars engage with cultural, social, and critical psychiatry, fields that have long emphasized sociocultural and structural determinants of mental health. Cultural psychiatry foregrounds how meaning-making, narrative, and social location shape distress (Kirmayer 2007), while social psychiatry highlights how economic inequality, systemic oppression, and social disintegration structure suicidality (Desjarlais 1995; Kleinman 1988). Such insights resonate deeply with the commitment of Critical Suicide Studies to relational ethics and structural critique.

However, Critical Suicide Studies is not merely an extension of these fields but a challenge to suicidology’s epistemic foundations. While cultural and social psychiatry critiques biomedical individualism, Critical Suicide Studies interrogates how suicide is made intelligible within settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and carceral systems of care. Scholars in the field engage with abolitionist movements, Indigenous resurgence, disability justice, and decolonial critique, expanding suicide discourse beyond mental health toward an interrogation of the conditions that make life livable. Rather than positioning Critical Suicide Studies as wholly distinct from critical psychiatric thought, it is better understood as part of a broader interdisciplinary movement that engages, extends, and at times resists these traditions in pursuit of more expansive possibilities for understanding and responding to suicide.

2.6. Suicide Prevention as Social Governance

The rise of neoliberalism and the decline of the social welfare state have profoundly shaped suicidology’s medicalization, individualization, and positivist orientations. As late 20th- and early 21st-century political and economic restructuring intensified social inequalities, structural approaches to mental health were replaced with an ethos of personal responsibility, self-management, and resilience over collective care and systemic intervention (Holt-Lunstad 2022; World Health Organization 2014). Within this shifting landscape, suicide prevention has increasingly relied on responsibilization and governmentality, deploying biomedical, psychological, and legal mechanisms to regulate and manage suicidal individuals.

This logic of control extends beyond psychiatric institutions, shaping broader social and political responses to distress. In the wake of environmental injustice, climate catastrophe, carceral violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, murdered and missing Indigenous women, and toxic drug deaths, suicide must be understood relationally—embedded within structures of capitalism, colonialism, genocide, and racism (Maynard and Simpson 2022). As they argue, these conditions expose “the violent hierarchies that define our world’s asymmetrical determinations of access to life—and vulnerability to death” (p. 60).

Despite these realities, dominant suicide prevention models remain decontextualized, individualized, and medicalized, obscuring suicide’s social, political, and historical dimensions. Contemporary approaches emphasize skill-building, coping mechanisms, and mental health literacy while promoting professional intervention for those deemed ‘at risk’ (East et al. 2021; Fitzpatrick 2020). These frameworks assume a universal, linear desire to live, failing to account for how social conditions shape the kinds of lives that are rendered livable.

Tack (2021) critiques this assumption, arguing that suicide prevention functions as an unquestioned social practice that sustains normative institutions that define which lives are valued. She writes:

This desire to live as one that is directed towards the future is, furthermore, the desire for a particular kind of life, the kind of life characterised by a number of heteronormative and capitalist objects that we find by being orientated towards this future life, such as heterosexuality, marriage, stable employment, the family, children, inheritance, which themselves simultaneously orientate us towards futurity and longevity (p. 52).

This critique underscores how suicide prevention operates not only to sustain life but also to govern the kinds of lives deemed worth preserving. It upholds a particular futurism—tethered to heteronormative, capitalist, and biomedical paradigms—that forecloses radical ways of analyzing suicide as a deeply political and relational phenomenon.

The prevailing psychocentric framing of suicidality has further narrowed inquiry, reducing suicide to individual pathology while obscuring structural, historical, and political determinants (Rimke 2000, 2010a, 2010b; Jaworski and Marsh 2024). The expanding influence of psychiatric and psychological sciences has created an epistemic hierarchy in suicidology, where clinical interventions and risk prediction models dictate what constitutes legitimate knowledge (Marsh 2010). This emphasis on prevention, intervention, and management has displaced radical, collective, and transformative responses to suicide—responses that might instead foreground relational, cultural, and historical dimensions of distress. As Jaworski and Marsh (2020) note, this narrowing has foreclosed “practical, social, cultural, and political levels” of engagement with suicide (p. 530).

Critical Suicide Studies rejects this foreclosure, advocating for a pluralistic and contested approach that recognizes suicidology as “a site of struggle, where meanings, methodologies, and identities are continuously up for contestation and re-imagination” (Costa and White 2024, p. 183). This stance directly challenges suicidology’s reliance on positivist paradigms, which privilege quantifiable data while excluding interpretive, relational and structural analyses. In response, Critical Suicide Studies foreground justice-oriented approaches that engage suicide’s complex social, cultural, and political dimensions, resisting its reduction to a problem of individual pathology.

2.7. Witnessing as a Counter-Hegemonic Practice

Returning to Sarah Hunt’s (2018) concept of witnessing, we understand witnessing as a radical act of validation—one that resists exclusion and violence by “humanizing, valuing, and loving…through acknowledging [subjective] stories, experiences, and perspectives” (p. 290). Within this framework, witnessing disrupts the epistemic violence of traditional suicidology, which has historically erased or marginalized the lived experiences of those most affected by suicide.

In this sense, a counter-hegemonic approach in Critical Suicide Studies is not only about critique—it offers a temporal intervention for reclaiming forms of knowledge, care and support that have been systematically excluded from dominant frameworks. Witnessing extends beyond visibility; as Hunt (2018) argues, it is an act of resistance that challenges the exclusion and violence faced by those affected by suicide.

Thus, Critical Suicide Studies does not simply broaden suicidology’s methodological scope—it interrogates its foundational assumptions. By centering on lived experience, relational accountability, and structural critique, it unsettles normative frameworks that constrain inquiry into suicide (Kouri and White 2014). This shift demands an approach that foregrounds the interplay of personal experiences, structural violence, and collective responsibilities, rejecting the framing of suicide as an individual pathology.

Yet, as Critical Suicide Studies continues to critique suicidology’s limitations, it must also ask: What lies beyond the critique? How does the field move from opposing conventional methods to affirming new possibilities—not only in research but also in political transformation? What do we seek to affirm in place of what we dismantle? How do we envision and enact suicidology that not only deconstructs harmful practices but also fosters spaces of healing, radical care, and social transformation?

3. A Desirous Struggle, or What Is Otherwise in the Critical?

In Choreo Glyph | Steel Trees, Fish Skins, and Futurity Cyphers, Kai Recollet (2018) crafts an Indigenous science fiction narrative that envisions life in 2084. The story follows the Celestials—descendants of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous peoples—as they explore the remnants of 21st-century Toronto, seeking to understand their ancestors’ “futurity practices” (p 1): collective “practices of assembly… of convergence” (p. 26) that sustained life amid colonial violence. They decode resistance glyphs etched in graffiti—icons bearing witness to disappeared and murdered relatives whose memories persist into 2084. From our present vantage point, these glyphs recall direct actions and blockades—such as the 2012 Idle No More round dances—symbols of defiance that preceded the Great Damage, a period of upheaval. These acts of resistance, though born of struggle, ultimately sustained the complex world that Celestials now inhabit.

One key memory is the 2016 “Tent City in front of the Police Station,” an abolitionist resistance to police brutality and state neglect in Toronto, where people gathered “to share food, create art, and extend love as a form of resistance” (p. 26). Recollet’s futurist storytelling functions as a temporal intervention akin to Sarah Hunt’s (2014) notion of witnessing—both revealing the present as it is and gesturing toward the actions necessary for a different future. Recollet (2018) engages Ashon Crawley’s (2016) concept of “otherwise,” which envisions alternative modes of social organization and relationality, rejecting dominant realities in favor of “other ways for us to be with each other,” emphasizing “the irreducible capacity to create change, to be something else, to explore, to imagine, to live fully, freely, vibrantly” (p. 4). Recollet connects this to sâkihiwâwin—the Cree concept of “love in action” (Recollet 2021, p. 230), situating the Celestials’ struggle as both an inheritance and a commitment to imagining new futures.

What if we witness Critical Suicide Studies through this lens? If we begin with the premise that our present condition is not static and that new practices and worlds must emerge, what might this produce? What life-affirming futures could take shape, and what existing worlds might need to end? Could our criticality move beyond critique toward a sustained struggle for the “otherwise”—a “rehearsal for living” (Maynard and Simpson 2022) or what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) call “the decolonial for” (p. 15)?

These questions echo Muñoz’s (2009) assertion that “queerness is not here yet” (p. 1). For Muñoz, queerness is not simply a state of being but a project of living (and dying) and a horizon of possibility. His notion of “astonishment” offers a way to transcend the limitations of the present, envisioning futures that disrupt normative constraints (p. 5). Drawing on Bloch’s distinction between “abstract” and “concrete” utopias (Bloch 1988a, 1988b, 1995, 1998a, 1998b, 2006), Muñoz argues that while abstract utopias remain detached from material conditions, concrete utopias emerge from collective struggle and historical consciousness—an educated hope that fuels transformation.

Dian Million’s (2011) concept of intense dreaming extends this, offering an Indigenous theorization that foregrounds imagination as both a political and ethical act (p. 313). Rooted in storytelling, memory, and relational ties, intense dreaming envisions spaces beyond colonial violence, while remaining grounded in material realities. This is not escapism but a radical practice that demands accountability from community values. Million writes, “the stake in intense dreaming is to release the creativity of the people, to involve all that is dear to you in the endeavor, and to practice from what it is you believe in” (p. 330). Similar to Muñoz’s concrete utopia, intense dreaming is a committed act of imagining and enacting futures that align with the ethical commitments of oppressed peoples.

Together, these theorizations of the utopian, queer, decolonial, concrete, and intensely dreamed highlight the challenge for Critical Suicide Studies—not only to imagine but to actively witness and practice the future of suicide studies. This is a future that is not here yet but one that must move beyond critique to embody the principles it seeks to affirm. In this context, witnessing is both a process and a goal—a participatory act that shapes suicidology committed to justice. This radical praxis is already reflected in the ethical commitments of the Critical Suicide Studies Network Working Group (2019).

This requires more than theoretical shifts; it demands a commitment to prefigurative politics (Trott 2016; York 2023) where the changes Critical Suicide Studies envisions are enacted in the present. This calls for constructing spaces that are not merely critical of existing structures but generative of new, socially just practices centered on relationality, cultural responsiveness, and collective well-being. The task is clear: to build a future for suicide studies that transcends critique and actively constructs a world in which care, justice, and radical transformation are the foundations of our work.

While some critics may dismiss Critical Suicide Studies as overly idealistic or impractical, it is crucial to recognize that its aspirational vision is neither naïve nor unachievable. The futures imagined by Muñoz, Million, Recollet, and others do not reject pragmatism; rather, they challenge dominant assumptions about what is possible given a deeper awareness of structural conditions. Critical Suicide Studies does not ignore the immediate and complex biopsychosocial struggles faced by those affected by suicide, nor does it shy away from the brutal realities of structural violence. Instead, it reframes these struggles as part of a broader movement that necessitates both short-term strategies and long-term transformation, requiring coalition building across kindred social movements.

Concrete utopias are rooted in historical consciousness and action rather than abstract fantasies. Thus, we must advance practices that address immediate harm while also building transformative futures. The call for prefigurative politics in suicide studies invites us to imagine practical interventions that are generative, culturally responsive, and grounded in relational care. This approach does not abandon those currently grappling with suicide but insists that addressing their needs requires radically rethinking the systems that create such despair in the first place. Critical Suicide Studies must engage in a complex negotiation between aspiration and action, offering a vision for future change while grounding our work in the material conditions of today. We call this a desirous struggle—because it is just that, a struggle, but one where we persistently imagine, enact, and sustain practices that affirm life and are grounded in an unwavering dedication to building a world that values justice, care, and relational transformation.

4. Results: Enacting Prefigurative Politics in Critical Suicide Studies

4.1. Prefiguration as a Path from Critique to Action

This section examines how prefigurative politics materializes within Critical Suicide Studies, demonstrating how present practices can embody the transformative futures we envision. Through this lens, Critical Suicide Studies move beyond critique to action, fostering methods and spaces grounded in mutual aid, relational accountability, and collective care. These outcomes illustrate the field’s potential to cultivate responses to suicide that center on dignity, agency, and solidarity—modeling an ethical practice of care aligned with plural visions of justice and transformation. While prefigurative politics is inherently anticipatory, it is not purely aspirational; community-led interventions have already enacted these commitments, developing non-coercive, relational, and justice-oriented responses to suicide outside dominant suicidological frameworks. The following examples highlight how prefigurative principles are manifested in survivor-led suicide prevention groups, abolitionist mental health responses, and Indigenous community models of care. Despite these challenges, these strategies actively resist carceral and medicalized paradigms, offering alternative pathways for suicide care.

In re-envisioning care within Critical Suicide Studies, we engage a broad archive of political thought and action to imagine a prefigurative politics—a practice in which the methods we use today reflect the futures we seek to create. Unlike instrumental approaches that prioritize outcomes over processes, prefigurative politics insists that the path to transformation must embody the values of an envisioned future. As Yates and Moor (2022) explain, prefigurative politics involves “the imaginative and experimental construction of ‘alternative’ modes of conduct,” ensuring their future relevance through either material realization or the diffusion of new ideas and practices (p. 183). Each act of engagement thus becomes an opportunity to manifest alternative worlds, making Critical Suicide Studies a dynamic and evolving political project rather than a fixed theoretical position (York 2023).

This vision moves beyond critique. While critique remains essential, prefigurative politics aligns Critical Suicide Studies with scholars and organizers who already engage in “practices of caring otherwise” as acts of survival and resistance against white supremacy, settler colonialism, ableism, and cis-heteropatriarchy (Sharman 2023, p. 15). As Dixon (2014) asserts, “how we get ourselves to a transformed society (the means) is importantly related to what that transformed society will be (the ends). The means prefigure the ends” (p. 85). This alignment challenges us to enact forms of care that reflect justice, relationality, and inclusivity—moving beyond critique to actively shape the futures we seek in theory and practice.

4.2. The Means and Ends of Critical Suicide Studies: Aligning Prefigurative Politics with Action

The concept of prefigurative politics, first theorized by Carl Boggs (1977), challenges traditional models of social change, particularly vanguardism and structural reformism. Boggs critiqued the idea that revolution must be led by an elite or that incremental reforms within oppressive systems would suffice to bring about change. Instead, he argued that movements must enact the future social relations they aspire to in the present, defining prefigurative politics as “the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal” (Jeffrey and Dyson 2021, p. 643).

This approach gained traction in leftist movements of the 1970s (Breines 1989; Epstein 1991 and has since influenced anti-globalization protests, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Movement for Black Lives, environmental justice movements, and the current Palestinian solidarity movement—demonstrating that movements must not only demand transformation but also embody the social futures they seek (Yates 2015, 2021; Evans 2021; Lajarthe and Laigle 2024; Ross 2022). As Graeber (2004) argues, “the organization [is] the movement’s ideology” (p. 84) meaning that participatory and decentralized structures of activism prefigure the egalitarian societies they envision (Monticelli 2021, p. 106).

Applying this framework to Critical Suicide Studies requires aligning means and ends—ensuring that research methods and care practices reflect the justice-oriented futures we aim to create. Instead of individualizing, coercive, or pathologizing approaches, scholars advocate community-led, relational, and justice-informed responses to suicide. For instance, Baril (2023) proposes shifting from control to accompaniment, centering on harm reduction rather than intervention. Instead of prioritizing the imperative to “save a life at any cost”—which often leads to coercive practices that compromise dignity and agency—Baril suggests that suicide should remain a discussable possibility, met with care, compassion, and understanding rather than fear or force.

Expanding on Baril’s work, we envision a collaborative system of care in which those considering suicide are no longer isolated. In this model, people grappling with life and death are met with tender, empathetic, and non-carceral responses, rather than immediate risk assessment and crisis management. They are recognized as relational beings engaged in ethical-political struggles for dignity, worthiness, responsibility, and livability.

In other words, the sustained struggle for the otherwise is inherently a communal endeavor. This recognition of our relational existence can be supported by practices that de-privatize suicide, contextualize suffering, and invite those with suicidal thoughts to join a broader collective or solidarity group. For example, within narrative therapy, a strong tradition exists of using collective documents, living documents, story collections, and other creative strategies to build engagement and share knowledge, skills, and wisdom for understanding and navigating “way-out thoughts” of suicide (Newman 2016).

A prefigurative approach would be one where those considering suicide are properly recognized for their own insights and analyses into the root causes of their suffering (often structural) and are given ample space and time to further explore ideas around living and dying, which includes acknowledging the potential for death to be understood as a response to profound injustice and colonial violence. Efforts to resist violence and survive are acknowledged and potentially amplified, allowing individuals to feel less stigmatized for contemplating suicide or rejecting degrading and unjust structural conditions. For those whose lives have been systematically devalued through colonial, genocidal, heteronormative, and white supremacist logics, death is ever-present, and suicide can become an extreme, albeit tragic, form of political refusal. However, recognizing that suicide may be framed as a form of political refusal does not mean endorsing it as a desirable or inevitable response.

4.3. Political Complexity of Suicide: Resistance, Partial Deaths, and Slow Death

In situations where life and death are not opposites but co-terminus, as in Berlant’s (2007) concept of “slow death” or Deleuze’s (1987) concept of “partial deaths,” following Webb (2024), these states of ongoing harm, marginalization, and endurance can function as sites of resistance. Unlike the notion of suicide as an individual act of political refusal, partial deaths unfold within the slow violence of colonial and capitalist structures, shaping conditions in which survival itself becomes a contested space of struggle. In this sense, they may serve as political resources for collective refusals, disinvestments, and the insurrection of subjugated knowledge (Foucault 1980), particularly when articulated through community mobilization, protest, and other forms of counter-hegemonic action.

It is important to stress that acknowledging how some individuals or communities frame suicide as a political act is not the same as advocating for suicide as a desirable or inevitable response. Rather, we emphasize that responses to suicide should center on dignity, relational accountability, and non-coercive care, creating conditions where individuals do not feel forced to make such decisions under conditions of injustice and deprivation. Understanding these framings helps inform more just, community-driven approaches to care, rather than reinforcing punitive, coercive, or medicalized responses that further isolate suicidal individuals. In critically engaging with these perspectives, we do not seek to romanticize or promote suicide as an idealized form of resistance. Rather, we argue that responses to suicide must recognize and address the social, political, and structural conditions that contribute to distress, ensuring that people are met with care and support that does not further entrench coercion, surveillance, or abandonment.

In this re-envisioned world, no matter what choice a person contemplating suicide ultimately makes—recognizing the highly constrained nature of “choice” when the conditions for a dignified life have been systematically denied—it would not be a decision made impulsively, shamefully, in isolation, or without regard for its political meaning. Previously private, solitary, and stigmatized experiences addressed by professionals became sites for collective action, joint learning, healing, and transformative justice. In this new reality, professionals, therapists, and healthcare providers would be freed from taking sole responsibility for another person’s life and would no longer act from a place of anxiety or liability concerns. Instead, they would meet the person on their terms, acknowledging that contemplating death and desiring to escape suffering through self-inflicted death are always possibilities. Such explorations are ripe for witnessing and worthy of deep engagement without imposing a predetermined ‘good outcome.’ This is a world worth striving for.

The emphasis on counter-institutional care in Critical Suicide Studies does not dismiss the role of psychiatric interventions but instead insists on moving with and beyond them—toward non-coercive, patient-led, and community-centered approaches. Critical psychiatry and antipsychiatry have long troubled dominant biomedical models by emphasizing relationality, cultural responsiveness, and the need to de-medicalize distress. While Critical Suicide Studies aligns with these critiques, it pushes further—not only asking how to shift clinical models, but also interrogating whether suicide response must exist outside carceral logic entirely. Rather than replicating mainstream mental health structures, Critical Suicide Studies align with communities practicing care on their own terms, where autonomy, dignity, and relational accountability guide responses to suicidality.

At the heart of prefigurative politics is the idea that the strategies used to achieve social change must embody the values of the future that they seek to create. As Yates and Moor (2022) explain, prefigurative politics involves “the imaginative and experimental construction of ‘alternative’ modes of conduct,” ensuring these alternatives shape the future through material realization or the diffusion of new ideas and practices (p. 183).

This alignment contrasts sharply with the notion that “good ends justify dubious means,” a critique often made when authoritarian measures are used to achieve emancipatory goals (Cooper 2020, p. 895). For example, it is easy to imagine how an institutional system acting from a misunderstanding of the “zero suicide” framework (Turner et al. 2021)—which explicitly recommends including those with lived experience in leadership and creating a caring workforce—might resort to surveillance, restraint, coercion, and other dehumanizing practices to reduce suicide.

When zero-suicide frameworks are narrowly understood or misapplied, the prevention strategies that follow may rob individuals of their agency, dignity, and autonomy. While the end goal might be achieved, the ethical costs can be enormous, reproducing hierarchies of violence and trauma that misalign with the principles of dignity, freedom, justice, and self-determination. Rather than adhering to a ‘save a life at any cost’ mindset, we might ask: what responses to suicidality bring us closer to the futures we are trying to create? How do our actions now foster care, community, dignity, justice, and freedom? What if we focused on causing zero harm, instead of zero suicide?

In Critical Suicide Studies, this re-orientation toward prefigurative care can be seen in the emphasis on relational and decolonial practices that mirror the broader aspirations of the field to dismantle systems of violence and oppression. Instead of using coercive or clinical measures to ‘treat’ suicidal individuals or simply ‘prevent suicide,’ Critical Suicide Studies advocates for community-based, relational, and transgressive approaches that reflect dignity, autonomy, and collective healing, decentering suicide prevention as the singular ethical response to the reality of suicide. Thus, the very practices of care in Critical Suicide Studies prefigure the liberatory futures the field aspires to create.

This vision resonates deeply with the disenchantment Critical Suicide Studies hold toward the conventional orthodoxy of suicidology. At its core, Critical Suicide Studies is animated by a desire to cultivate conditions for living together with less violence, injustice, and degradation and with more opportunities for peace, joy, justice, dignity, and flourishing for all, not merely or even necessarily the prevention of death by suicide. Critical Suicide Studies exist at the intersection of scholarship, social change, and collective imagination, operating through multiple levels and scales, including policy, ethics, research, politics, pedagogy, advocacy, and grassroots social organization. Critical Suicide Studies, in its practices and aspirations, and in a sense, as an emerging social movement, becomes a means of dreaming and enacting the otherwise, actively engaging with both critique and the cultivation of radical alternatives to conventional suicidology.

4.4. Improvisation and Experimentation in Critical Suicide Studies Practice

Improvisation and experimentation are central to prefigurative politics, which frame social transformation as a dynamic, evolving process requiring continual adaptation. Jeffrey and Dyson (2021) describe this as “restless improvisation,” wherein activists reshape objects, materials, landscapes, and affective atmospheres to remain responsive and innovative (p. 653). This ethic of ongoing experimentation is crucial for movements to remain relevant amid shifting challenges.

In Critical Suicide Studies, this improvisational spirit is evident in the commitment to reimagine suicide beyond static notions of prevention. By embracing radical experimentation with approaches grounded in diverse, ethically informed perspectives, the field aims to expand the repertoire of responses available to communities, moving beyond the carceral interventions typical of traditional suicidology. Instead, this approach fosters responses that honor the dignity and desires of those affected. However, an honest appraisal reveals limitations in the diversity of Critical Suicide Studies. Although it is expanding through conferences, seminars, and networks, the field still largely consists of North American, European, and Australasian academics predominantly based in universities.

To fully embody the transformative potential of Critical Suicide Studies, the field must engage with those already building alternative knowledge systems—individuals and communities cultivating life-affirming responses that diverge from dominant Euro-Western frameworks. White (2020) observes that the privileged knowledge of predominantly white, Anglo-American suicidologists “sits alongside a deep reservoir of exiled and disqualified knowledge (i.e., suicide attempters; youth; mad, racialized, disabled, queer, Indigenous peoples, migrants, prisoners, people who use drugs, the global south, etc.),” which makes conventional suicidology “ripe for cutting” (p. 75). To pursue epistemic justice, Critical Suicide Studies must center anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial perspectives as foundational to their transformative goals.

Epistemic justice and the pursuit of interdependent, decolonial futures are inherently social and spatial. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “For us to make reality… we have to make places. There is no social life that is not spatial life. There is no dream of a better future that isn’t also a dream of organizing ourselves with one another and the environments in particular places, wherever they might be.” (as quoted in Kolhatkar 2023, para. 10, line 6). Envisioning a better future requires reimagining how we organize ourselves and the environments in which we act. For Critical Suicide Studies, this means not only rethinking theoretical frameworks but also creating spaces for collective care and transformation—spaces grounded in the experiences of communities traditionally excluded from suicidology’s knowledge production.

For example, Polanco and X (2021) illustrate how diverse knowledge systems can reshape our understanding of mental health and suicide in the decolonial context of Abya Yala. Their “witnessing practices,” rooted in place-based knowledge, honor unique cultural lineages and resources for coexistence. In the Andean region, decoloniality transcends theory; it is a way of life that resists Euro-Western colonization. They write, “decoloniality brings forward a relationality and interconnectedness that advances the possibility of the coexistence of multiple perspectives without a center” (p. 2). When the dominance of a white, Euro-Western, hierarchical worldview is revealed as one possibility among many (Escobar 2018), alternative ways of living, relating, and even dying—grounded in diverse cultural understandings—become possible. In this interdependent, relational world, responses to suffering must be rooted in an ethic of mutual accountability and collective care.

With a resonant relational vision, Ansloos (2023) advocates reframing suicide within First Nations as part of a broader struggle linked to environmental justice. He argues that suicide must be understood within a larger story of communities striving for self-determination under the weight of settler colonial empire-building and the somatechnics of global extractivism, where life-promoting responses center on the sovereignty of lands and waters not merely as ecological domains of prevention but as kin with whom the struggle for livability is shared in solidarity. This view dissolves human-centric hierarchies, replacing isolated anthropocentric interventions with broader strategies grounded in relational accountability and shared governance, as informed by Indigenous ontoepistemologies.

Similarly, Hanman-Siegersma (2024) offers an experimental vision by exploring how narrative therapy, which has roots in Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being, emphasizes friendship and solidarity as social responses to suicidal distress and situates individual suffering within larger sociopolitical and historical contexts of Indigenous peoples. This approach moves away from expert-driven, medicalized frameworks and offers a model that is responsive to people experiencing multiple forms of marginalization. By foregrounding informal acts of friendship and solidarity, Hanman-Siegersma underscores how relational care can foster belonging, meaning, and connection—resources vital for those facing social exclusion and existential distress.

Lenette’s (2023) work embodies the potential of prefigurative politics in suicide research by championing experimental, culturally responsive methods within refugee communities. She emphasizes creative epistemologies that decolonize relationships with the body, emotions, and stories. Through practices such as body mapping, digital storytelling, and poetry, Lenette’s work with African migrant youth engages with the social and historical dimensions of trauma without internalizing, individualizing, or medicalizing distress. Her participatory methods demonstrate that non-medicalized responses to suicide—rooted in creative practices—serve as both a means and an end, providing space to express grief, resilience, and agency in ways that challenge depoliticized narratives of suicide. This improvisational approach fosters spaces for healing and cultural affirmation, highlighting how distress is deeply interconnected with broader socio-historical forces.

Building on this approach, Kasherwa et al. (2024) use collaborative poetic inquiry and reflexive discussions to address how cultural dissonance and generational trauma impact South Sudanese youth. Using poetry as an expressive and experimental practice, they provide space for youth to voice silenced experiences and cultivate resilience through shared narratives. Their approach highlights the need for research that centers on communal witnessing and culturally attuned expressions of vulnerability, reinforcing Critical Suicide Studies’ goal to foster agency, resist Western-centric norms, and build intergenerational resilience through ethically engaged, experimental practices.

These examples underscore that commitment to improvisation and experimentation in Critical Suicide Studies demands not only courage but also radical, transdisciplinary, and trans-hemispheric alliances and a genuine diversity of voices. Expanding epistemological, methodological, and ontological frameworks is essential for dismantling the rigid structures of conventional suicidology. In this context, improvisation is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is a survival strategy—a practiced responsiveness that reclaims agency, adapts to new possibilities, and reimagines the conditions under which life and dignity can flourish.

4.5. Blurring the Boundaries and Margins: Critical Suicide Studies in the Everyday

Prefigurative politics invites us to see change as permeating all facets of life, beyond formal advocacy and academic research. This boundary-blurring approach calls for the application of the principles of Critical Suicide Studies in our professional roles, personal relationships, daily interactions, and self-care practices. Yates and Moor (2022) argue that prefigurative politics integrates movement principles into everyday routines, thereby dissolving the divide between activism and ordinary life. For Critical Suicide Studies, this means enacting relational care, dignity, and resistance not only in research and policy but also in micro-interactions, mutual support, and acts of solidarity that sustain communities.

This aligns with Corntassel’s (2012) concept of “everyday acts of resurgence,” where daily practices sustain Indigenous presence and resist colonial violence—not as isolated political acts, but as commitments to integrity and connection. Similarly, Harney and Moten’s (2013) vision of Black Study as a “fugitive” intellectual practice flourishes outside formal institutions, resisting conventional metrics of success (p. 74). These interconnected practices—Indigenous resurgence, Black Study, and Critical Suicide Studies—while distinct, share a commitment to cultivating spaces of solidarity, where care and resistance to structural violence are “hidden in plain sight” from those who “refuse to see and hear” (p. 74).

For Critical Suicide Studies, this reframes the field beyond academic silos into the fabric of daily life, existing wherever people engage in mutual support and affirm life as a collective endeavor. Just as Harney and Moten describe Black Study as stealing “from professions, from the university…with neither apologies nor malice” (p. 74), Critical Suicide Studies must draw on diverse, transgressive knowledge forms and lived experiences, resisting hierarchies of expertise. This relational approach shifts from isolated clinical practices to nurturing life through engagement and mutual support. Critical Suicide Studies emerge as a “kinetic set of positions,” a social practice grounded in community dignity (p. 73).

Alvarez’s (2024) autoethnography offers a profound example of these positions, reimagining suicidology through a deeply embodied and communal practice. As a young Filipino gay man navigating childhood trauma and suicidality, Alvarez dismantles the clinical detachment often associated with suicidology. Instead, his writing is a survival practice rooted in an intimacy with suffering that resists categorization. He writes “to plunge [himself] into depths and resurface anew,” “to create stories that resist and demand to be told” (pp. 6–7), moving beyond the private struggle to cultivate a collective space where grief and resistance intertwine.

In Alvarez’s words, “I write to set my insides on fire. I write to rupture and to mend. I write because I must,” we see a commitment that defies institutional boundaries, treating suicidology as an everyday act of resilience and reclamation (pp. 6–7). His work invites us to imagine suicidology not as a formal discipline but as a shared, underground current—emerging wherever people engage in the difficult, often unacknowledged work of caring for each other in the face of inherited traumas. His writing embodies a refusal to separate personal anguish from structural forces, offering a communal response to suffering that is as much about solidarity as it is about survival. In doing so, he nurtures collective resilience, dignity, and transformation, not through institutions but through persistent acts of care that hold communities together.

Viewed through this lens, Critical Suicide Studies emerges as a relational practice that addresses the conditions of daily life for those impacted by structural violence. This boundary-blurring perspective envisions suicide responses that are both preventive and generative and are rooted in mutual aid, collective care, and social transformation. It reorients how suicide is studied and lived, shifting from isolating interventions to enduring practices that cultivate compassion and possibilities for good living.

Krebs’s (2017) concept of the “narrative wreck,” inspired by Frank (2013), captures how significant disruptions—such as suicide attempts—fracture individuals’ expected life stories, leaving them stranded in narrative disarray. Survivors must reinterpret their past to find hope in what has been and what lies ahead. Although this process is often considered the domain of therapists, Krebs reminds us that everyday acts of restoration enable people to imagine otherwise futures (p. 121). This reauthoring within the ordinary, non-expert spaces of life is essential to moving forward, allowing survivors to reconstruct agency and coherence amid disrupted personal histories.

Expanding narrative work beyond clinical settings into community-based and creative spaces transforms meaning-making into a shared and sustaining practice. Here, storytelling is a quiet yet potent means of reclaiming identity and agency—a way of narrating life that resonates both personally and collectively. By nurturing spaces for these reauthored stories, Critical Suicide Studies affirms resilience as an everyday relational practice rooted in acts of care and connection that enable people to envision new futures on their own terms.

Stirling and Chandler (2021) bring a nuanced view to everyday activism by reflecting on the quiet resistance of self-harm visibility, challenging stigmas that cast scars as inherently “dangerous” or “threatening.” They describe self-harm as consisting not only of “moments of drama” but also of “small, quiet feelings and sensations that do become part of the pattern of your life” (p. 164). Choosing to “be seen” with self-harm scars is a subtle yet profound act of resistance that defies societal discomfort and judgment, embodying a form of activism embedded in everyday life rather than being formally declared.

This everyday visibility is not without its ambivalence. Stirling and Chandler express unease with the label of “activist,” feeling it “unworthy” and “unsuitable” for acts that involve “quieter and personally resonant disruptions” rather than overt demonstrations (p. 168). Yet their choice to resist invisibility aligns with Harney and Moten’s (2013) notion of the “hidden in plain sight,” where acts of resistance take form not through grand gestures but through a subtle, persistent presence. What Stirling and Chandler call the “mundane visibility” of scars is an embodied critique, challenging the narratives society imposes on their bodies without resorting to what they call the “negative connotations of ‘drama’” (p. 168). In so doing, Stirling and Chandler demonstrate how presence itself can shift our thinking about self-harm, broadening understandings of lived experience and practicing a transformative form of activism, which takes the shape of small acts of courage of being in the world, authenticity, which ripples out.

Thira’s (2014) study reveals prefigurative practices where cultural activism and healing dissolve the boundaries between personal recovery and collective resilience. In describing how “the more I was giving, the less pain I was carrying” (p. 151), one participant illuminates a practice of care that blurs self and community, transforming personal healing into a shared act of survival and mutual aid. This approach disrupts the isolation of mental health frameworks, situating resilience within acts of giving and connection rather than individual recovery alone. Here, helping others lightens one’s own suffering and generates a collective ethos of care beyond formal institutions, emerging within relationships that sustain the community.

Another participant in Thira’s study, a cultural teacher, explains, “I share the teachings…being a teacher today…it gives support and insight into individuals who are seeking and wanting something to ground themselves” (p. 154). Their words reveal a merging of self and cultural wisdom, embodying a relational identity that challenges frameworks that position knowledge-sharing and healing as separate. These interconnected acts of cultural survival and resilience sustain both community well-being and cultural teachings.

These practices exemplify a critical reimagining of suicidology, where survival is not only about individual intervention but also about nurturing an ecology of relational, cultural, and everyday acts of resistance that sustain communal life. In this way, Critical Suicide Studies shift from clinical or academic silos to engaging in the lived, collective practices of care that directly confront and subvert the colonial conditions that generate despair.

4.6. Counter-Institutional Models of Care: Reimagining Responses to Suicide

Envisioning a future where Critical Suicide Studies contribute to collective well-being, we recognize the significance of counter-institutions—alternative spaces operating outside mainstream systems that foster autonomy, collective care, and self-determination. Grounded in prefigurative politics, these counter-institutions enact an “ethics of listening” (Fullagar 2003, p. 305), prioritizing dignity, agency, and relationality over control and coercion. Prefiguration, as Monticelli (2021) explains, is a process that emphasizes “alternative practices of production and social reproduction” to challenge dominant power structures (p. 114). Counter-institutions embody this ethos, modeling social organization rooted in mutual aid, community autonomy, and non-hierarchical support.

Across the globe, counter-institutions demonstrate that care-based approaches to suicide response are not only possible but also actively shape more just futures. For example, Trans Lifeline, a peer support and crisis hotline, disrupts conventional suicide crisis intervention by rejecting non-consensual and carceral responses. Committed to never involving the police without consent, the organization acknowledges the systemic harm that emergency responses pose to Black, Indigenous, disabled, and trans communities. Asserting that “police are not trained in crisis support… they present an extreme threat of violence” (Trans Lifeline 2024), this initiative enacts a proleptic approach central to prefigurative politics, providing care “as though the future they desire is already being realized” (Klein Schaarsberg 2023, p. 8). This model has significantly increased access to crisis support for transgender and nonbinary individuals who might otherwise avoid seeking help due to fear of criminalization, coercion, or violence.

Similarly, DISCHARGED Suicide Peer Support groups create spaces where individuals experiencing suicidal distress can share their experiences free from clinical intervention. DISCHARGED—Deserving of Inclusion, Support, Community, Hope, Authenticity, Respect, Growth, Empathy, and Determination—embodies counter-institutional values by fostering self-determination and a sense of belonging. Participants highlight the need for “a trustworthy person who listens deeply and will stand beside them” (Radford et al. 2019), addressing gaps in traditional mental health systems that often “disempower, silence, and erode autonomy” (Radford et al. 2019). These peer-led spaces operate on the principles of horizontalism, where collective decision-making and distributed authority reinforce solidarity (Yates and Moor 2022, p. 184).

Even within carceral settings, counter-institutional frameworks are emerging. Peer-led suicide prevention programs in prisons challenge punitive custodial norms by prioritizing mutual care over surveillance. In these programs, incarcerated individuals serve as “peer safety companions,” creating networks of solidarity within systems designed to isolate them (Tartaro and Klenk 2023). Studies have shown that such approaches significantly reduce suicide rates and self-harm, lower anxiety and depression, and increase engagement in support services (Bagnall et al. 2015; Walton et al. 2024). By centering relational accountability rather than punitive interventions, these programs illustrate how suicide responses can be reimagined even under conditions of extreme constraint.

The Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC) convenes and creates counter-institutional spaces through festivals, public art, and immersive digital experiences, offering new ways for individuals and communities to explore suicidal distress outside of traditional clinical assumptions and healthcare settings. One of BARC’s recent installations, Slice/Silence, created by Indigo Daya, addresses societal silencing around self-injury and suicidality.

In this space, participants engage with cushions symbolizing bodies marked by trauma, which they are invited to “hold… injure… stitch… bandage… destroy… [and] tattoo” (Daya 2024, para. 3, line 3). This tactile, embodied process disrupts the clinical focus on containment and pathology, offering survivors the chance to engage directly with their experiences and reclaim narratives that are often suppressed or medicalized in traditional settings. Slice/Silence fosters collective witnessing, which challenges the silencing norms of conventional mental health care. Daya organizes events where community members are invited to “hear what we’ve said in the cushions” (para. 3, line 5), allowing survivors to share stories of self-injury openly and without judgment. In this inclusive space, as Daya emphasizes, “every part of you is welcome” (para. 4, lines 1-2), breaking down the hierarchical and risk-based structures typical of clinical settings that can limit expression and impose stigma. By centering on survivor-led and community-driven healing, Slice/Silence embodies a counter-institutional ethos of compassion, creativity, and social justice, moving beyond surveillance and control. Daya’s installation reimagines support for suicidal people as an anticarceral space of autonomy and shared power where survivors co-create emancipatory models of care. In this way, Slice/Silence not only critiques conventional prevention systems but also actively constructs an alternative rooted in justice and the lived experiences of those it serves.

Peer-led bereavement groups in Denmark and Ireland offer another example of counter-institutional care. These spaces allow individuals bereaved by suicide to grieve authentically and free from judgment. Participants describe these groups as “transformative space[s]” where “the masks drop completely” (Hybholt et al. 2022, p. 7). Unlike clinical settings that often frame grief within diagnostic categories, peer-led spaces foster agency, relationality, and appreciation for diverse experiences. Such approaches represent a departure from deficit-based models, instead centering “strengths, potentials, and positive possibilities” as vital to healing.

Complementing these initiatives, Drustrup et al. (2023) advocate for an abolitionist counter-space for psychotherapy for suicidal individuals, shifting safety planning away from police involvement. Instead, they propose community-based networks to ensure safety without state surveillance, aligning with Critical Suicide Studies’ counter-institutional commitment to non-coercive, justice-centered responses. By refusing to rely on criminalizing systems, these approaches create more accessible and ethical frameworks for suicide care.

These counter-institutional spaces provide Critical Suicide Studies with concrete models for enacting transformative, community-led alternatives to mainstream suicidology. By prioritizing collective self-determination and mutual support, Critical Suicide Studies moves beyond critique and actively participates in the construction of anti-carceral, justice-oriented responses to suicide. This requires recognizing peer support networks, mutual aid structures, and survivor-led spaces as the core of the movement, rather than peripheral alternatives. Ultimately, counter-institutional approaches led by people with lived experience underscore that trauma, grief, and healing are not isolated clinical issues but shared relational experiences. These initiatives reimagine suicide response as an act of solidarity rather than containment, focusing on collective care rather than coercive intervention. This is not just an alternative—it is a radical transformation of what it means to care, to support, and to stand with those affected by suicide.

5. Discussion: Notes on Care, Resistance, and Cultivating Possibility

In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe (2023) reimagines a note as an act of care—an attentive practice of noticing what might otherwise be overlooked: “the strange miracle of rhubarb growing,” “mutual aid feeding people in all of their hungers,” or “the look of the sky, changing and familiar” (p. 350). In Critical Suicide Studies, we, too, take note—not only of the contours of suicide but of the spaces where survival and solidarity persist, often unnoticed. Through these acts of witnessing and care, we refuse the dominant logics of suicidology that reduce suicide to pathology, risk, and deficit. Instead, we attune ourselves to the beauty, agency, and resilience that emerge even in conditions of profound loss. This practice insists that each life and each act of mutual aid and solidarity arise from spaces where healing and hope endure despite the forces that seek to erase them. To witness, to dream, to prefigure—these are the notes of Critical Suicide Studies, marking what must not be forgotten and gesturing toward worlds where those who have been treated as disposable are recognized as fully human and deserving of dignity, care, and life.

This act of noticing carries an inherent tension: the imperative to care for the present while refusing to accept its conditions as inevitable. Critical Suicide Studies exist in this tension, documenting and understanding suffering while simultaneously working to cultivate alternative futures. It is both critique and creation, an insistence that new possibilities must be imagined and enacted in real time. Prefigurative politics is central to this project; however, prefiguration alone cannot create transformation unless it is tied to the material struggle against the structures that perpetuate suffering. As Monticelli (2021) argues, “the idea of transcending capitalism by developing alternatives within its cracks” underscores the necessity of enacting different forms of care within existing systems while also working to dismantle them. Thus, each act of care within Critical Suicide Studies must connect to broader movements that challenge the social, political, and economic conditions that make suicide a rational response to injustice.

Another central tension in Critical Suicide Studies is the relationship between emergent praxis and institutionalized “best practices.” Emergent praxis—flexible, responsive approaches grounded in specific cultural and political contexts—prioritizes creativity, relationality, and situated knowledge, especially for those excluded from dominant suicidology research. These practices reject rigid, depoliticized frameworks in favor of modes of care that are rooted in lived experience. However, theory and research remain vital for shaping ethical and accountable responses to suicide. Turner et al. (2020) stress that systems must be “designed to purposely enable them to go right,” emphasizing the need for approaches that prioritize adaptability without sacrificing ethical integrity (p. 575). This requires a dynamic feedback loop between research and practice, ensuring that theory informs action while remaining responsive to the realities of those directly impacted.

This interplay between critique and action resonates with what Holloway (2010) and Trott (2016) describe as the “negation-and-creation” approach within social movements—a process of “oppose-and-propose,” wherein movements simultaneously resist oppressive systems while embodying new ways of affirming life. Brown (2017) argues that reclaiming imagination is a revolutionary act that resists colonial trauma and its constraints. Through emergent practices and structured care, Critical Suicide Studies strengthens what Brown calls “the muscle to imagine” a future shaped by justice-oriented and culturally responsive forms of care.

The relationship between absolutism and inclusivity is a critical tension in the prefigurative politics of Critical Suicide Studies. Absolutist stances—whether rejecting certain scientific approaches, professional roles, or theoretical frameworks—risk narrowing the field’s transformative potential. Instead, Critical Suicide Studies should cultivate a broad, inclusive vision that embraces diverse understandings and responses to suicide, including those offered by “imperfect allies” (Reynolds 2010, p. 13).

Alexis Shotwell’s Building Complicity with Another World (2023) provides a crucial framework for navigating these ethical complexities (Shotwell 2023). Shotwell critiques “purity politics,” arguing that transformation requires recognizing our complicity in systemic harm rather than reducing it to isolated blame. Her concept of “oppositional complicities” urges us to acknowledge that we are always embedded within imperfect, often harmful systems—whether in psychiatry, social work, or academia—while simultaneously resisting and reshaping these structures. This complicity does not preclude action but demands accountability.

Critical Suicide Studies must, therefore, engage with those embedded in systems often viewed as harmful but who remain committed to transformative change. The challenge, as Shotwell frames it, is whether we can build a “big enough table” to include those navigating complex and contradictory roles without reinforcing violence. Complicity, in this sense, becomes a shared responsibility—an ethical stance that fosters collective care rather than individualizing harm. Rather than fixating on purity, Critical Suicide Studies should function as an incubator for life-affirming possibilities that connect personal experiences to structural transformations.

The examples in this paper illustrate that prefigurative politics in suicide response is not merely theoretical but actively shapes real-world practices. Community-led interventions—whether through peer support networks, abolitionist crisis response, or survivor-led initiatives—demonstrate how suicide care can be enacted in ways that refuse carceral, medicalized, and risk-based logic. These models affirm that alternative infrastructures of care are not only possible but are already in motion.

Ultimately, Critical Suicide Studies must move beyond critique and toward action. The field does not only challenge suicidology’s limitations but foregrounds transformative, survivor-led, abolitionist, and decolonial models of care. Witnessing, dreaming, and prefiguration are not abstract principles but active methodologies that have shaped the evolution of suicide research and its responses. The challenge is not only to rethink suicidology but also to participate in building new structures of care where responses to suicide prioritize dignity, mutual responsibility, and radical possibility.

6. Conclusions

Grounded in lived experience, we have positioned witnessing, dreaming, and prefiguration as fundamental relational practices animating our commitment to care and transformation. In Critical Suicide Studies, witnessing is far more than observational—it is an embodied, ethical act that, as Sharpe (2016) describes, constitutes wake work: a mode of attunement that refuses indifference and holds shared suffering as a collective responsibility. This witnessing resists the extractive tendencies of traditional suicidology, aligning with Hunt and Farrales’s (2024) critique of abstraction and their call for embodied, relational ways of knowing. To witness, then, is to resist objectification and to center those impacted by suicide not as subjects of study but as lives entangled with ours, deserving of dignity, justice, and care.

Dreaming, for us, is not escapism but a radical reimagining. It is a practice of envisioning futures where structures of violence—settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and carceral mental health systems—are dismantled and where those experiencing suicidality find genuine belonging. Hunt and Farrales (2024) describe this as a “re-orientation toward collective solidarities,” an insistence on worlds beyond the constraints of the present (425). Dreaming in Critical Suicide Studies does not turn away from suffering; rather, it insists that another way is possible.

Prefiguration is the responsibility that follows—translating radical dreams into embodied practices, however imperfect or incomplete they may be. If we take Hunt and Farrales’s (2024) emphasis on solidarity seriously, we must not only critique oppressive systems but also actively enact alternative modes of care in the present. Sharpe (2016) describes care as “shared risk,” an insistence on vulnerability and mutual accountability in the face of harm. In Critical Suicide Studies, this requires building relations of care that reject the pathologization of suicide and instead foster spaces of transformative justice, where those experiencing suicidality are not treated as objects of intervention but as part of a collective struggle toward livable futures. These relational practices—witnessing, dreaming, prefiguration—are not abstract commitments; they are the everyday, embodied work of creating spaces that affirm a vision of justice: a world where good lives and good deaths are possible for all our relations.

These commitments are necessarily lived and relational, continuously shaped by the experiences of those most impacted by suicide. Critical Suicide Studies do not seek to resolve the tensions between local and systemic approaches, emergent and structured practices, or absolutist and inclusive perspectives. Instead, it embraces these tensions as generative. As Hunt and Farrales (2024) suggest, such tensions reflect a “desirous longing” (Million 2009) for a world where suicide studies are grounded in dignity, justice, and care. Suicide, as White (2012) reminds us, is a “wild problem”—one that defies simplistic solutions. Rather than seeking to resolve it, we see these tensions as openings: pathways through which care and solidarity can become the foundation of how we reimagine suicide, how we relate to suicidal people, and how we work toward a world where suicide exists but despair is no longer inevitable.

Each witnessed life and death—whether marked by living with suicidality, dying by suicide, or surviving after suicide—demands that we continue this work. Every refusal of despair and radical act of care signals a commitment to futures already unfolding, even if not yet fully realized. Critical Suicide Studies have the potential to illuminate and nurture otherwise worlds, to recognize life where dominant narratives only see loss, and to create spaces where despair meets solidarity. This calls for responses to suicide that go beyond prevention alone, working instead toward lives grounded in mutuality, justice, and care.

As we bear witness, we commit not only to understanding our world but also to reimagining and building it otherwise. In these Critical Suicide Notes, we insist that care can transform harm into hope, even as cycles of violence and dispossession continue—from Gaza to Neskantaga, Sudan to Alice Springs, Georgia to Maharashtra, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to the shelters in the Darién, and beyond. Let us continue—to notice, to nurture, and to enact more livable worlds now.