Bi⁵: An Autoethnographic Analysis of a Lived Experience Suicide Attempt Survivor Through Grief Concepts and ‘Participant’ Positionality in Community Research

Reviewer 1

Comments

Responses

·       This is a high quality work of autoethnography. The author uses 5 conceptual thematics to explicate lived experience of grief as an essential aspect of surviving a suicide attempt. The author insightfully rejects a positivist logic and methodology in favor of a human science approach in the existential phenomenological tradition. Although the author does not cite nor explicitly develop this work as an existential phenomenological research project, the autoethnographic approach is deeply indebted to the theoretical and methodological principles of existential phenomenology. The author offers abiding attention to positionality or situatedness of the person—the author themself—in an effort to explicate the surpa-personal dynamics through which grief takes on the structures of these 5 conceptual thematics. Intersectionality offers an important buttress against any “static-fication” of the identity categories of “Muslim,” “gender-fluid,” “postpartum bipolar.” The explication of the intersectionalities of these identifications are placed in the context of the COVID pandemic and the realities of “military law, systematic starvation, inaccessible clean water, lack of health infrastructure, rampant viral illness, incessant displacement and entrapment” that characterize Palestinian existence in Gaza today, and as it impacts the Palestinian and Muslim diaspora. The intersectional aspect of this work is especially strong and reveals the structural and existential interdependencies involved when persons question the meaning of their existence, as is most pointedly the case in attempting suicide and surviving. This is a major contribution of the work.

·       Reviewer 1 points out the aim and argument of the article: “The author uses 5 conceptual thematics to explicate lived experience of grief as an essential aspect of surviving a suicide attempt.”

·       It is very important that the author be more precise in the use of the word “scientific” (lines 27, 61, 97, 148, 230, 420, 427, 506, 636, 564, 669, 674). The underlying presumption informing the author’s use of “scientific” is that it defined by positivist quantitative logics that collapses meaning into fixed units (either linguistic or mathematical symbols), and that through the fixing of these units one can discover laws or principles that function atemporally, acontextually, and without any influence from the idiosyncrasies of the human observer. Positivistic logic offers important knowledge about phenomena after the fact of their conceptualization. Phenomenological logics, in contrast, investigate how those very conceptualizations become possible in the first place. Research conducted within positivist logics reduce perception to the thing perceived. Phenomenological research investigates how our human situatedness in time, place and culture, create the conditions in which this particular meaning (i.e., perceptive capacity) becomes established as the socially understood as taken-for-granted significations.

·       Added lines 693-695 to address the use of the term “scientific”

·       There is no need for the author to reinforce the general presumption positivist logic is the only logic that constitutes scientific work. In this regard the author needs to attend to two specific points in the conduct of this specific autoethnographic research project. The first is a basic tendency, present throughout the work, to use “identity” in positivist sense as something that is fixed enough in common understanding to be adequate as a sufficient condition for theorizing. For example, the author writes, “Insiders are researchers who identify with some sociodemographic background of participants who are eligible to volunteer as human subjects research, e.g., faith, race/ethnicity, gender” (lines 661-662). This is true only in the most superficial sense, and the author’s own work demonstrates the insufficiency of this as constitution “insider status.” The rich autoethnographic detail offered by the author throughout this work reveals that “insider status” is achieved through actual communication with others/community wherein connection and understanding is achieved and mutually recognized, not presumed. Indeed, one of the dangers of autoethnography is the solidification of “my experience” in ways that limit the very goal of discovering the complexities of the relationship between our social situatedness and what emerges in consciousness as experience.

·       Added lines 700-707 to reflect the sentiments of this comment

·       The second point is the tendency to flatten the “data” (excerpts offered by the author) with its “analysis.” The analyses have a tendency to remain on the same level of the “data,” functioning as a summary rather than an analysis. The author themself recognizes that “data” (that which is given) is inadequate to account for “experience” when they say “Often, in my experiences with the Muslim community and outside of it, I found that people did not have the terminology to make sense of their lived experiences, including myself” (lines 152-153). Having the “terminology” appears helpful, but the author’s use of it here follows a positivist logic that reduces the naming of something to the thing it names. The author’s insight is that the meaningfulness of experience must be made (taken, i.e., “capta”). The terminology is helpful because it points to phenomena yet to be articulated. To achieve this articulation requires communication with others/community—it cannot be merely introspective without risking solipsism. Neither can it rely on given taxonomies and their terminologies that allow us to fix meaning without examining the complexities of the relationships among consciousness, social situatedness and the meaning one comes to make of experience. More robust analyses can be pursued by recognizing the difference between the “content” of and “modality” of experience. The 5 conceptual thematics used by the author as the basis of this research can be understood as “modalities of experience” in that the point to an orientation toward that leads to a particular manifestation of experience—i.e., its “content.” The author’s experience and subsequent analysis should attend to the relationship between the modalities and contents of experience. I suggest that the author go back through the analyses without seeking to locate a determinative thing, but rather with a fleshing out of the relationalities that make “disenfranchised grief,” “ambiguous loss,” “anticipatory grief,” “secondary loss,” and “collective grief,” take the shape they do in experience. Autoethnography is used by this author intuitively rather than through and engagement with existing literature.

·       I understand ethnography as both a "process and product” and presented the text as such.

·       It is a very good application of autoethnographic methodology, and I do not think that it is necessary that the author engage the large body of literature on autoethnography to do the work presented here. But I do suggest that the author take a look at this work: 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020, which will provide much theoretical depth related to human situatedness and our relation to the social, historical and cultural structures through which consciousness of experience emerges as such.

·       This work is full of richly developed conceptual and theoretical material and offers great insight into the complex of circumstances through which we seek human connection and understanding. Suicidality and grief are revealed to be tremendously significant phenomenon bearing directly on our very humanity is it realized and/or degraded by virtue of our being situated within the irreducible interdependencies of our human lives.

·       Noted

·       Noted

Reviewer 2

Comments

Response: Reviewer 2

·       What is the aim of the article?

·       What is the actual argument?

·       An objective statement was added to make the aim of the article more clear.

·       Please question the use of the word, 'scientific.' Given your focus on qualitative/auto-ethnography, this word shouldn't be really used as qualitative research of any kind questions the idea of scientific 'objectivity' (as you do at some point briefly) and quantitative research dismisses anything qualitative research does as biased and so on.

·       Added lines 693-695 to address the use of the term “scientific”

·       The article focuses on auto-ethnography and auto-ethnographic analysis. Yet not once is auto-auto ethnography and its qualitative methodology ever referenced. This quite astonishing given the plethora of research on qualitative methodologies and auto-ethnographies. Referencing Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams, and Arthur Bochner is a start.

·       What you write is absolutely your choice. If possible, can you write more clearly about how you became suicidal? I ask purely because it's hard to figure out what happened based on the indirect way it is written. In saying this, I have no doubt you've experienced hardships and situations where suicide seemed like the right choice at the time. My point is about communicating.

·       Being a participant and researcher, or inside knower, has been discussed in qualitative research for some time now, and in the new field of critical suicide studies. Please read up on this literature to understand the key debates, and to reference what otherwise is not very well referenced throughout your piece.

·       You discuss major things in suicide like research encounters (page 4 out of 18) but this is not referenced. Your aim to promote an interpretivist approach is nothing new and has been done in suicide studies during the last decade, if not longer.

·       Your use of language sometimes reflects a tension. You want to do something scientific except that it isn't. Perhaps, emphasise rigour in your qualitative approach to the use of auto-ethnography in the context of Muslim experiences of suicide instead of the scientific paradigm?

·       Postcolonial writers such as the great Edward Said and many more would be so useful to your thinking - read up on them.

·       Added line 28 references to ethnographic and qualitative methods.

·       Noted. This can be a future manuscript.

·       Noted. The key debates of being an insider beyond the scope of this paper.

·       It is not referenced as it is “based on my observations.”

·       Unclear what this is seeking.

·       Noted re: orientalism.

·       You discuss gender fluidity and trans, but don't define such terms. Furthermore, they need to be referenced a lot more given the amount of research done on trans and gender fluidity.

·       On page 8 out of 18 on the PDF copy, have a look at queer muslim writings as they could be useful to your points in the first paragraph.

·       Anticipatory grief, like other types of grief discussed in the manuscript, needs to be defined a lot better, drawing on exisiting research literature. I didn't quite understand the relationship between anticipatory grief and suicidality as this wasn't well analysed and explained. It came across as living in a liminal space of suicidality. You confuse causation with correlation in some of your claims throughout your manuscript.

·       Page 9 out of 18: you discuss bipolar and what clinicians do, but never reference anything. For critique of psychiatry, there are definitely lots of good critical voices in exisiting research whether this is in critical suicide studies or in sociology or even psychology.

·       The claim of race being socially constructed is correct, but where is the referencing? This has been debated for a long time now in critical race theory but also postcolonial studies and so on.

·       On page 10 out of 18: the relationship between suicidality and the Gazan genocide is interesting (and certainly what is happening in Gaza is unforgivable) but the connection between suicide and genocide is not strong at all, and so much more needs to be said.

·       Page 13 out of 18, at the bottom you discuss postcolonial but never reference it. Also Sandoval's (2000) Methodology of the Oppressed might be useful towards your research endeavours.

·       Added references and definition to lines 318-319

·       Added references to Queer Muslims in lines 374-375

·       Unclear

·       It is outside the scope of the paper to critique psychiatry, and this is a future topic.

·       Added critical race praxis on line 672

·       Added references and additional content in lines 649-66

·       Added reference to line 693

·       Pages 14-15: identifying yourself as Muslim suicidal survivor is valuable as this hasn't been done in research, but the identification of suicidal survivors in research has been covered in exisiting research for the past 10 years or so.

·       Narrative methodology has been deployed in suicide research and you need to reference this.

·       Noted.

·       Added reference in lines 732-733.

Reviewer 1

Reviewer 2

Comments

Responses

Comments

Response: Reviewer 2

·       This is a high quality work of autoethnography. The author uses 5 conceptual thematics to explicate lived experience of grief as an essential aspect of surviving a suicide attempt. The author insightfully rejects a positivist logic and methodology in favor of a human science approach in the existential phenomenological tradition. Although the author does not cite nor explicitly develop this work as an existential phenomenological research project, the autoethnographic approach is deeply indebted to the theoretical and methodological principles of existential phenomenology. The author offers abiding attention to positionality or situatedness of the person—the author themself—in an effort to explicate the surpa-personal dynamics through which grief takes on the structures of these 5 conceptual thematics. Intersectionality offers an important buttress against any “static-fication” of the identity categories of “Muslim,” “gender-fluid,” “postpartum bipolar.” The explication of the intersectionalities of these identifications are placed in the context of the COVID pandemic and the realities of “military law, systematic starvation, inaccessible clean water, lack of health infrastructure, rampant viral illness, incessant displacement and entrapment” that characterize Palestinian existence in Gaza today, and as it impacts the Palestinian and Muslim diaspora. The intersectional aspect of this work is especially strong and reveals the structural and existential interdependencies involved when persons question the meaning of their existence, as is most pointedly the case in attempting suicide and surviving. This is a major contribution of the work.

·       Reviewer 1 points out the aim and argument of the article: “The author uses 5 conceptual thematics to explicate lived experience of grief as an essential aspect of surviving a suicide attempt.”

·       What is the aim of the article?

·       What is the actual argument?

·       Revised with objective statement and fuller introduction in lines 35-97

·       It is very important that the author be more precise in the use of the word “scientific” (lines 27, 61, 97, 148, 230, 420, 427, 506, 636, 564, 669, 674). The underlying presumption informing the author’s use of “scientific” is that it defined by positivist quantitative logics that collapses meaning into fixed units (either linguistic or mathematical symbols), and that through the fixing of these units one can discover laws or principles that function atemporally, acontextually, and without any influence from the idiosyncrasies of the human observer. Positivistic logic offers important knowledge about phenomena after the fact of their conceptualization. Phenomenological logics, in contrast, investigate how those very conceptualizations become possible in the first place. Research conducted within positivist logics reduce perception to the thing perceived. Phenomenological research investigates how our human situatedness in time, place and culture, create the conditions in which this particular meaning (i.e., perceptive capacity) becomes established as the socially understood as taken-for-granted significations.

·       Revised to remove the word “scientific” with “academic” in multiple phrases

·       Please question the use of the word, 'scientific.' Given your focus on qualitative/auto-ethnography, this word shouldn't be really used as qualitative research of any kind questions the idea of scientific 'objectivity' (as you do at some point briefly) and quantitative research dismisses anything qualitative research does as biased and so on.

·       Revised to remove the word “scientific” with “academic” in multiple phrases

·       There is no need for the author to reinforce the general presumption positivist logic is the only logic that constitutes scientific work. In this regard the author needs to attend to two specific points in the conduct of this specific autoethnographic research project. The first is a basic tendency, present throughout the work, to use “identity” in positivist sense as something that is fixed enough in common understanding to be adequate as a sufficient condition for theorizing. For example, the author writes, “Insiders are researchers who identify with some sociodemographic background of participants who are eligible to volunteer as human subjects research, e.g., faith, race/ethnicity, gender” (lines 661-662). This is true only in the most superficial sense, and the author’s own work demonstrates the insufficiency of this as constitution “insider status.” The rich autoethnographic detail offered by the author throughout this work reveals that “insider status” is achieved through actual communication with others/community wherein connection and understanding is achieved and mutually recognized, not presumed. Indeed, one of the dangers of autoethnography is the solidification of “my experience” in ways that limit the very goal of discovering the complexities of the relationship between our social situatedness and what emerges in consciousness as experience.

·       Added lines 1134-35 to reflect the sentiments of this comment on fluidity of identity

·       The article focuses on auto-ethnography and auto-ethnographic analysis. Yet not once is auto-auto ethnography and its qualitative methodology ever referenced. This quite astonishing given the plethora of research on qualitative methodologies and auto-ethnographies. Referencing Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams, and Arthur Bochner is a start.

·       What you write is absolutely your choice. If possible, can you write more clearly about how you became suicidal? I ask purely because it's hard to figure out what happened based on the indirect way it is written. In saying this, I have no doubt you've experienced hardships and situations where suicide seemed like the right choice at the time. My point is about communicating.

·       Being a participant and researcher, or inside knower, has been discussed in qualitative research for some time now, and in the new field of critical suicide studies. Please read up on this literature to understand the key debates, and to reference what otherwise is not very well referenced throughout your piece.

·       You discuss major things in suicide like research encounters (page 4 out of 18) but this is not referenced. Your aim to promote an interpretivist approach is nothing new and has been done in suicide studies during the last decade, if not longer.

·       Your use of language sometimes reflects a tension. You want to do something scientific except that it isn't. Perhaps, emphasise rigour in your qualitative approach to the use of auto-ethnography in the context of Muslim experiences of suicide instead of the scientific paradigm?

·       Postcolonial writers such as the great Edward Said and many more would be so useful to your thinking - read up on them.

·       Added extensive background on ethnography and qualitative methods in introduction lines 1-88

·       Noted. This can be a future manuscript that I hinted at in the revised text.

·       Noted. The key debates of being an insider beyond the scope of this paper. Revised to discuss emicperspectives throughout

·       Revised to cite past research in lines 348, and lines 349-453 with expanded significance section.

·       Added discussion of rigor in lines 1058-1077.

·       Revised with Said in lines 129-140.

·       The second point is the tendency to flatten the “data” (excerpts offered by the author) with its “analysis.” The analyses have a tendency to remain on the same level of the “data,” functioning as a summary rather than an analysis. The author themself recognizes that “data” (that which is given) is inadequate to account for “experience” when they say “Often, in my experiences with the Muslim community and outside of it, I found that people did not have the terminology to make sense of their lived experiences, including myself” (lines 152-153). Having the “terminology” appears helpful, but the author’s use of it here follows a positivist logic that reduces the naming of something to the thing it names. The author’s insight is that the meaningfulness of experience must be made (taken, i.e., “capta”). The terminology is helpful because it points to phenomena yet to be articulated. To achieve this articulation requires communication with others/community—it cannot be merely introspective without risking solipsism. Neither can it rely on given taxonomies and their terminologies that allow us to fix meaning without examining the complexities of the relationships among consciousness, social situatedness and the meaning one comes to make of experience. More robust analyses can be pursued by recognizing the difference between the “content” of and “modality” of experience. The 5 conceptual thematics used by the author as the basis of this research can be understood as “modalities of experience” in that the point to an orientation toward that leads to a particular manifestation of experience—i.e., its “content.” The author’s experience and subsequent analysis should attend to the relationship between the modalities and contents of experience. I suggest that the author go back through the analyses without seeking to locate a determinative thing, but rather with a fleshing out of the relationalities that make “disenfranchised grief,” “ambiguous loss,” “anticipatory grief,” “secondary loss,” and “collective grief,” take the shape they do in experience. Autoethnography is used by this author intuitively rather than through and engagement with existing literature.

·       Noted to  understand ethnography as both a "process and product” and presented the text as such. Revised section on discussion regarding collaborative ethnography for future directions in lines 1079-1143.

·       You discuss gender fluidity and trans, but don't define such terms. Furthermore, they need to be referenced a lot more given the amount of research done on trans and gender fluidity.

·       On page 8 out of 18 on the PDF copy, have a look at queer muslim writings as they could be useful to your points in the first paragraph.

·       Anticipatory grief, like other types of grief discussed in the manuscript, needs to be defined a lot better, drawing on exisiting research literature. I didn't quite understand the relationship between anticipatory grief and suicidality as this wasn't well analysed and explained. It came across as living in a liminal space of suicidality. You confuse causation with correlation in some of your claims throughout your manuscript.

·       Page 9 out of 18: you discuss bipolar and what clinicians do, but never reference anything. For critique of psychiatry, there are definitely lots of good critical voices in exisiting research whether this is in critical suicide studies or in sociology or even psychology.

·       The claim of race being socially constructed is correct, but where is the referencing? This has been debated for a long time now in critical race theory but also postcolonial studies and so on.

·       On page 10 out of 18: the relationship between suicidality and the Gazan genocide is interesting (and certainly what is happening in Gaza is unforgivable) but the connection between suicide and genocide is not strong at all, and so much more needs to be said.

·       Page 13 out of 18, at the bottom you discuss postcolonial but never reference it. Also Sandoval's (2000) Methodology of the Oppressed might be useful towards your research endeavours.

·       Added references and expanded on gender based violence in lines 691-702

·       Added references to Queer Muslims in lines 686-688

Revised lines 752-766 to clarify anticipatory grief

·       It is outside the scope of the paper to critique psychiatry, and this is a future topic.

·       Added critical race theory in conceptual model in lines 366-463

·       Added on genocide and suicide in lines 995-1015

·       Added historical colonial violence theory in conceptual model in lines 366-463

·       It is a very good application of autoethnographic methodology, and I do not think that it is necessary that the author engage the large body of literature on autoethnography to do the work presented here. But I do suggest that the author take a look at this work: 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Edited by Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020, which will provide much theoretical depth related to human situatedness and our relation to the social, historical and cultural structures through which consciousness of experience emerges as such.

·       This work is full of richly developed conceptual and theoretical material and offers great insight into the complex of circumstances through which we seek human connection and understanding. Suicidality and grief are revealed to be tremendously significant phenomenon bearing directly on our very humanity is it realized and/or degraded by virtue of our being situated within the irreducible interdependencies of our human lives.

·       Revised to engage wider body of literature and added conceptual model.

·       Noted

·       Pages 14-15: identifying yourself as Muslim suicidal survivor is valuable as this hasn't been done in research, but the identification of suicidal survivors in research has been covered in exisiting research for the past 10 years or so.

·       Narrative methodology has been deployed in suicide research and you need to reference this.

·       Revised in lines 436-438.

·       Revised introduction in lines 1100-1101.