The Idea of Suicide: Contagion, Imitation, and Cultural Diffusion
... Shneidman (1971,1985) identificó una serie de características psicológicas generales sobre el comportamiento suicida que pueden agruparse en 2 condiciones necesarias y suficientes para su ocurrencia, estas son la perturbación y la letalidad (Kral, 1994). Por perturbación se entiende lo que Shneidman denomina dolor psicológico (psychache) y se relaciona con el grado de decepción, desesperación, agonía, miedo, furia, desesperanza, aislamiento, miseria, vergüenza, culpa, humillación, al punto de volverse insoportable para el individuo (Shneidman,1971,1985citado en Kral, 1994Shneidman,1998 citado en Kral, 2019). El autor señala que cuando las necesidades más importantes desde el punto de vista del individuo no son satisfechas, el dolor psicológico aparece actuando como un motivador de la conducta suicida (Shneidman, 1998 citado en Kral, 2019). ...
... Por perturbación se entiende lo que Shneidman denomina dolor psicológico (psychache) y se relaciona con el grado de decepción, desesperación, agonía, miedo, furia, desesperanza, aislamiento, miseria, vergüenza, culpa, humillación, al punto de volverse insoportable para el individuo (Shneidman,1971,1985citado en Kral, 1994Shneidman,1998 citado en Kral, 2019). El autor señala que cuando las necesidades más importantes desde el punto de vista del individuo no son satisfechas, el dolor psicológico aparece actuando como un motivador de la conducta suicida (Shneidman, 1998 citado en Kral, 2019). La letalidad refiere a la intencionalidad y singularidad que ofrece el suicidio en tanto opción para terminar con la perturbación, es la adopción de la idea del suicidio como un plan de acción (Shneidman 1971,1985citado en Kral, 1994. ...
... Sin embargo, la mayoría de las personas con dolor psicológico o depresión utilizan otras estrategias de afrontamiento y no eligen suicidarse (Kral, 1994;O`Connor, 2021), es por ello que la perturbación es una condición necesaria (debe estar) pero no suficiente (su mera presencia no desencadena en suicidio). Existen muchas teorías sobre la perturbación que toman en cuenta los factores de riesgo suicida y que no logran diferenciar aquellos individuos deprimidos que no se suicidan de aquellos individuos deprimidos que llegan a suicidarse realmente 15 , lo que explica, en parte, las dificultades para predecir el suicidio desde hace 50 años (Joiner, 2005;Kral, 2019;Franklin et al, 2017citado en O'Connor y Kirtley, 2018. Por este motivo Kral (1994Kral ( ,1998Kral ( , 2019 sugiere que debemos tratar de entender mejor las condiciones de la letalidad, con el fin de entender como la idea del suicidio logra convertirse en una opción aceptable para algunos individuos vulnerables en determinadas culturas. ...
El suicidio en Uruguay se presenta como un fenómeno de difícil interpretación. A la interna del país se han registrado históricamente mayores tasas para ciertos departamentos del interior y las menores tasas para Montevideo. Existen a la fecha dos conjuntos de hipótesis para explicar esta distribución diferencial del número de suicidios. La primera hipótesis y que cuenta con mayor respaldo empírico, señala las diferencias estructurales en términos económicos, políticos y culturales entre las zonas suicidógenas y la capital (Robertt, 1999; Hein y González ,2017; Pérez, González y Hein, 2021). La segunda, teoriza sobre el impacto del laicismo en la inhibición del acto suicida (Guigou, 2020). Esta última hipótesis haya mayor respaldo si se compara la geografía religiosa del país (Sotelo, 2010; Ágora, 2021) con las tasas suicidas. Considerando ambas hipótesis se puede inferir que la constancia del fenómeno suicida en determinados territorios tenga un correlato en las actitudes y los comportamientos de sus habitantes. La literatura revisada sugiere que existe asociación entre la exposición al suicidio (conocer a alguien con comportamiento suicida), la aceptabilidad hacia el suicidio (en qué medida aparece como una opción aceptable en ciertas circunstancias) y el comportamiento suicida mismo. A su vez, la afiliación religiosa se presenta como un factor protectivo ante la exposición al suicidio y como un elemento relacionado con actitudes más negativas hacia el mismo. Este proyecto se propone investigar la aceptabilidad del suicidio en diferentes departamentos de Uruguay con tasas de suicidio altas, medias y bajas. Se empleará el Cuestionario de Creencias Actitudinales sobre el Comportamiento Suicida (CCCS-18) (Ruiz, Navarro-Ruiz, Torrente y Rodríguez, 2005) para comparar los niveles de aceptabilidad en cada departamento y analizar su asociación con la prevalencia de comportamientos suicidas. Además, se examinará la relación entre la exposición al suicidio y su aceptabilidad en poblaciones con distintas tasas de suicidio. Por último, se buscará comparar la influencia de la afiliación religiosa en la aceptabilidad del suicidio en estos departamentos.
... This includes the impact of colonial histories on current communities, changing notions of self and personhood at broad cultural levels, and the transnational networks that people participate in by virtue of the internet. These networks include the pathways that communicate the idea of suicide as an option, making it more thinkable and doable in ways that may be culture-specific (Arbutyn et al., 2020;Kitanaka, 2011;Kral, 2019;Niezen, 2009Niezen, , 2013Ozawa-De Silva, 2010). ...
... These dynamics are not only interpersonal (in the sense of affecting individuals through interactions with others in their local niche) but also involve larger social structural processes that shape the individual's embodied experience and sense of agency. This includes the circulating narratives, images, and metaphors that communicate the idea of suicide as an option, making it more thinkable and doable (Arbutyn et al., 2020;Kral, 1998Kral, , 2019Niezen, 2015). ...
This article introduces a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry on suicide in cultural context. Developmental and social structural factors including exposure to violence, childhood abuse and privation, as well as intractable social problems that create psychic pain and a sense of entrapment have been shown to increase the risk of suicidal behavior. However, all of the major social determinants identified in suicide research are influenced or mediated by particular cultural meanings and contexts. To move beyond crude generalizations about suicide based on psychological theories developed mainly in Western contexts and culture-specific prototypes or exemplars, we need more fine-grained analysis of the experience of diverse populations. The articles in this issue provide clear illustrations of the impact of cultural and con-textual factors in the causes of suicide, with implications for psychiatric research, theory, and practice. Cross-cultural research points to the possibility of developing a typology of social predicaments affecting specific sociodemographic groups and populations. This typology could be elaborated and applied in clinical and public health practice through an ecosocial approach that considers the ways that suicide is embodied and enacted in social systemic contexts.
... The desire to marry is the individual's inclination to choose a partner and share goals, characteristics, thoughts, and attitudes with awareness of its positive and negative effects on life (Haslam & Montrose, 2015). The desire to marry is an important concept in relationships, defined as the readiness of an individual to respond positively or negatively to a person, object, or event (Kral, 2019). The desire to marry is presented as the most important motivation for young people to form a family (Riahi & Khayatan, 2018). ...
Objective: The present study aimed to compare the effectiveness of schema therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy before marriage on the desire to marry and fear of marriage among single women.
Methods and Materials: The present study was quasi-experimental, employing a pre-test and post-test design with a non-equivalent control group. The study population consisted of single women in district one of Tehran in 2022. The sample included 60 individuals selected via convenience sampling based on a call from the study population and randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. Participants responded to the Heidari, Mazaheri, and Pooretemad (2004) marriage desire questionnaire and the Samiei, Yousefi, and Nashatdoust (2014) fear of marriage questionnaire before and after the intervention. The first experimental group underwent schema therapy and the second experimental group underwent cognitive-behavioral therapy in eight 90-minute sessions, based on the schema therapy protocol (Leahy, Robert, 2011) and the cognitive-behavioral therapy protocol (Beck, 1964), respectively. Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and follow-up tests with SPSS software.
Findings: The results showed that schema therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy significantly increased the desire to marry and decreased the fear of marriage among single women (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: Given the findings, it can be concluded that pre-marriage schema therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy can be proposed as effective therapeutic methods for improving the desire to marry and reducing the fear of marriage among single women and can be employed as significant and key interventions in the pre-marriage domain.
https://journals.kmanpub.com/index.php/jayps/article/view/1921
... Dissemination of the details of a suicide has been identified as an instigating factor in the subsequent complete and incomplete suicides of others. As noted by Maris, there is no reason to doubt this association because humans are basically imitative of each other [4]. This is termed suicide contagion. ...
Purpose of Review
Suicide is a serious healthcare concern worldwide. In the USA, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death prior to 2020 when it was displaced as a result of the death toll from COVID-19.
Recent Findings
Suicide behavior is the result of the interaction between the individual’s predisposing factors and precipitating factors. A recognized precipitating factor is the knowledge of the suicidal act of another, termed suicide contagion. Another precipitating factor is the physiological impact of an acute inflammatory response to disease, for example that seen in patients with COVID-19.
Summary
Risk identification of persons at increased risk for suicidal actions is an essential goal in medical care so that protective measures can be employed to prevent suicide.
... Meaning that, the "experts" of the study of suicide participate in a "self-authenticating style of reasoning" (Marsh, 2015: 18) that favors positivism and regulates the borders of suicidology. This epistemic favoritism (White, 2020) and propensity to frame suicide as an irrational outcome (Jaworski, 2020;Marsh, 2020) deprives the field of more contextual, justice-oriented, and historically intertwined understandings of suicide (Ansloos, 2018;Button and Marsh, 2020;Chandler, 2020;Kral, 2019;Manning, 2020;White, 2017;White et al., 2015). The way suicide manifests within Indigenous communities warrants a multifaceted appraisal and moreover, the practice of prevention informed by this dominant approach has been ineffective in our context of practice. ...
This paper considers how Indigenous studies can inform the evolution of critical research on suicide. Aligned with critiques of mainstream suicidology, these methodological approaches provide a roadmap for structural analysis of complex systems and logics in which the phenomenon of suicide emerges. Moving beyond mere naming of social determinants of suicide and consistent with calls for a theory of justice within suicide research, Indigenous studies helps to advance conceptual knowledge of suicide in descriptive means and enhance ethical responses to suicide beyond psychocentric domains. Through centering Indigenous theories of affect, biosociality, and land-based relations, this article examines what new knowledge of suicide can emerge, as well as what ethical responses are possible to suicide and to a world where suicide exists. This new knowledge can inform practices for critical suicide studies which are invested in resisting structural violence, nourish agency, dignity and freedom for those living and dying in often-unlivable presents, and enhancing livability for individuals, communities, and the environment living under shadows of empire. Implications for theory, ethics, and suicide research and prevention practice are considered.
... Suicide contagion is described as the increase in suicides following the reporting or news of another suicide (Kral, 2019). This phenomenon is also known as the "Werther Effect," coined by Phillips (1974) after the book The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which resulted in several copycat suicides emulating the death of the main character (World Health Organization [WHO], 2017). ...
Since its initial release as a Netflix television series in 2017, 13 Reasons Why has caught the attention of professionals and viewers alike because of its gripping storylines and controversial content. The show’s explicit nature has prompted mental health professionals to draw the public’s attention to the possibility of suicide contagion, especially among adolescent viewers. This paper is a comprehensive review of the show, a review of the current research on its epidemiological impact on the public, and a guide for mental health professionals and the general public on how to respond to the current information that we know about the show and its possible effects on viewers.
The issue of suicide has garnered considerable attention in refugee scholarship, where research examines how unique forced migration and resettlement challenges exacerbate risks and vul-nerabilities to suicide. However, there are gaps in understanding the social and cultural factors shaping the lived experience of suicide in refugee communities. Using the example of Afri-can-background young people in Australia, this paper presents a collaboration among two aca-demics and two South Sudanese youth advocates to explore the sociocultural factors impacting suicidality through reflexive discussions and collaborative poetry. This combined approach of-fered a unique and nuanced conceptual and methodological framework to contribute culturally specific narratives to critical suicide studies and challenge western-centric and biomedical per-spectives on suicide. The process highlighted (i) the lack of dialogue about suicide in the South Sudanese community, and (ii) an absence of community-based support structures to address sui-cide. This paper provides useful insights on the culturally specific context of suicide, adding ref-ugee perspectives to the discipline of critical suicide studies.
Sociological research on suicide has tended to favour functionalist approaches, and quantitative methods. This article argues for an alternative engagement – drawing on interpretive paradigms, and inspired by ‘live’ methodologies, we make an argument for a haunted sociology of suicide. This approach, informed by Avery Gordon’s haunted sociological imagination and Lauren Berlant’s concept of slow death, works between the structural realities of inequalities in suicide rates and the more (in)tangible affects of suicide as they are lived. These theoretical engagements are illustrated through an empirical study which used collaborative, arts-based discussion groups about suicide. The groups were held with 14 people, all affected in different ways by suicide, and attending a community-based mental health centre in a semi-rural location in Scotland, UK. A narrative-informed analysis of data generated through these groups shows the creative potential of both arts-based methodologies, and interpretive sociologies, in deepening understanding of how inequalities in rates of suicide may be experienced and made sense of. We illustrate this via two related metaphors (‘the point’ and ‘the edge’) which recurred in the data. Our analysis underlines the vital relevance of sociology to suicide studies – and the urgent need for diverse sociological engagement and action on this topic.
Across all types of life-course transitions, the success or failure of the adjustment process is mutually shaped by both the person and the environment (e.g., the other person). However, frequently researchers, practitioners, and laypersons focus mainly on the person (“the newcomer”). The emerging movement toward social inclusion—that is, the call to comprehensively support the adjustment of “the others,” in spite of them being ethnically, intellectually, or physically different from the majority of the given community members—represents the opposite approach, as it highlights the society role in prevention of maladjustment. Based on humanistic values and social justice, this movement pursues the changes in the environment readiness to open itself to all people. Lessons from this movement are much related to the understanding of many transitional episodes.KeywordsInclusionOpennessValuesSocial justiceCommunitySupportThe other
Aim: The aim of this study was to compare attitudes and tendencies towards premarital relationships and irrational beliefs with self-restraint in male and female students. Methods: The research method was descriptive causal-comparative. The statistical population consisted of all students of Shahid Beheshti University in 2015-2016, from which 365 people (170 boys and 195 girls) were selected as a sample by stratified random sampling method. Tools for data collection included the following questionnaires: Irrational Beliefs (Jones, 1980), Premarital Relationship (Cordlow, 2001), and the Self-Determent Questionnaire (Weinberger and Schwartz, 1990). Results: Data analysis by independent t-test showed that there is a significant difference between attitudes and tendencies towards premarital relationship, irrational beliefs and self-restraint in male and female students (P<0.01). Conclusion: The results showed that gender is a factor influencing attitudes and tendencies towards premarital relationships, irrational beliefs and self-restraint. As such, males had greater attitudes and tendencies toward premarital relationships, and lower irrational and slef-restrait, compared with female students.
Suicide is commonly understood as an explicitly individual choice. This understanding has been advanced by an anthropocentric viewpoint in contemporary studies of suicide, which see suicide, unsurprisingly, as a thoroughly human phenomenon, defined by humans and relegated to the human mind, culture, and discourse. The problem with this approach toward understanding suicide is with how agency is interpreted. There is an assumption that the agency of suicide is entirely human because of the individual desire and intention to die, manifested in the act of taking one’s own life. But what if the exercise of human agency depends on something else in the course of materializing the act of suicide? This chapter responds to this problem by analyzing the gendering of suicide in The Virgin Suicides (1993), written by Jeffrey Eugenides. Drawing on the new materialist feminist scholarship, I argue that agency in suicide is more than human, because that which is human depends on nonhuman materiality. I also argue that the feminine, traditionally interpreted as reactive and passive in suicide, is in fact agentic. The chapter begins by discussing the cultural context of interpreting gender, which influences how the suicides of the teenage Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Bonnie, Therese, Lux, and Mary—are understood. I then analyze the power of the masculine gaze and the way it frames and fails to frame the five suicides. I also analyze the gendering of feminine bodies and sexuality. Finally, I consider the significance of the suburban landscape and mood as key to understanding suicidal agency.
The above statement is of a well-known researcher of the subject of suicide. Suicide points to consider the phenomenon of various perspectives: philosophical, theological , sociological, clinical, psychological, and psycho-pedagogical. The choice of this direction of analysis depends on the theoretical and methodological assumptions adopted by the researcher. My study, focus on psycho-pedagogical. I will try to combine the phenomenon of suicide with the so-called "Young people with difficulties." My analysis will be carried out in the area of bio-psycho-ecological theory, which allows me to approach this subject in a multidimensional way, because I am of the opinion of multidimensional approach brings the best results.
Warto pamiętać, że ludzie nie zabijają się dlatego, że nie chcą żyć. Raczej dlatego, że nie wiedzą, jak dalej żyć(Brunon Hołyst)
Powyższe stwierdzenie znanego badacza problematyki samobójstw pozwala na rozpatrywanie tego zjawiska z różnych perspektyw: filozoficzno-teologicznej, socjologicznej, klinicznej, psychologicznej, i psychopedagogicznej. Wybór
kierunku analizy zależy od przyjętych przez badacza założeń teoretycznych i metodologicznych. W moim opracowaniu uprzywilejowanym kierunkiem rozważań
będzie ten ostatni, czyli psychopedagogiczny.
Spróbuję połączyć zjawisko samobójstwa z problematyką tzw. „młodzieży
z trudnościami” (potocznie określanej „młodzieżą trudną”). Moja analiza przebiegać będzie przez obszar teorii biopsychoekologicznej, która pozwala mi na
wielowymiarowe podejście do tej tematyki, gdyż uważam, iż taką ona właśnie jest.
This paper proposes a research direction to advance AI which draws inspiration from cognitive theories of human decision making. The premise is that if we gain insights about the causes of some human capabilities that are still lacking in AI (for instance, adaptability, generalizability, common sense, and causal reasoning), we may obtain similar capabilities in an AI system by embedding these causal components. We hope that the high-level description of our vision included in this paper, as well as the several research questions that we propose to consider, can stimulate the AI research community to define, try and evaluate new methodologies, frameworks, and evaluation metrics, in the spirit of achieving a better understanding of both human and machine intelligence.
We develop a multiple rational expectations model of securities prices to explain the determinants of financial market contagion. Although the model allows contagion through several channels, our primary focus is on contagion through cross-market rebalancing. Through this channel, investors transmit idiosyncratic shocks from one market to others by adjusting their portfolios' exposures to macroeconomic risks which are shared across markets. The pattern and severity of financial contagion depends on markets' sensitivities to shared macroeconomic risk factors, and on the amount of information asymmetry in each market. The model can generate contagion in the absence of news, and between markets that do not directly share macroeconomic risks.
Suicide prevention is a major goal of the Public Health Service of the US government. This has been the case since the 1960s when the National Institute of Mental Health established a center for the study and prevention of suicide. Since then, however, the knowledge and research gathered has not bought about the reduction of suicide. Suicide: Closing the Exits was written to change this trend. This book reports a program of research concerned with preventing suicide by restricting access to lethal agents, such as guns, drugs, and carbon monoxide. It may seem implausible that deeply unhappy people could be prevented from killing themselves by "closing the exits," but the idea is not a new one and has been discussed widely in the literature. The authors argue that restricting access to lethal agents should be considered a major preventive strategy, along with the psychiatric treatment of depressed and suicidal individuals and the establishment of suicide prevention centers to counsel those in crisis. Suicide represents a major contribution to the literature. As such, it should be read by all medical practitioners, policy makers, and psychologists.
The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide currently seems to be the most popular theory in suicidology. It posits that suicide can be explained by the simultaneous presence of three risk factors only, namely acquired capability for suicide, thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness. Suicide is, however, widely accepted as a complex, multifactorial, and contextual phenomenon. It is, therefore, surprising that a theory comprised by three internal factors only is so uncritically embraced by suicide researchers. In this article, we scrutinize the theory’s background, core components, and purported empirical evidence and argue that its popularity is highly unwarranted.
This is a stand-alone reflection on meaning written by two scholars who recently edited a special issue on that topic. The first of four organizing questions concerns the nature of meaning. The meaning of signs (e.g., words) consists of nonphysical connection (e.g., symbolism) and potential organization. Meanwhile, existential meaning (meaning of life) involves purpose, value, mattering, continuity, and coherence. The second question concerns how meaning affects behavior. Answers are diverse and multifaceted, ranging from efforts to grapple with uncertainty and unknowns to engaging in significance-seeking violence and self-regulating in light of abstract values and standards. To the question of whether meaning is made or found, the authors propose that finding meaning is prevalent, while the creation of new meanings is only supported in a limited sense. Although often portrayed as a constructive process, accessing meaning normally involves relating target stimuli to what is already known. A fourth question asks whether meaning is individual/personal or collective/social. The collective dimension plays an integral yet often neglected role in scaffolding personal meanings.
This chapter considers some of the qualities of the "cohort effect" as manifested in patterns of aboriginal youth suicide in northern Canada. Drawing from the author's experience in an aboriginal community faced with a catastrophic suicide cluster, the chapter describes the way a high frequency of suicide occurred within a close group of friends, in which the idea of suicide became normalized, even celebrated, in everyday life. Suicide in other words, became a way to belong to the group, and to become a memorable person with the self-inflicted end of life. This observation has implications for intervention, which can be more effective by intervening in the transmission of suicide ideation among youth cohorts and the communities in which they live.
By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self-sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power-differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture.
Balancing current and historical issues, this volume of essays covers the most significant worldwide epidemics from the Black Death to AIDS.
Great pandemics have resulted in significant death tolls and major social disruption. Other "virgin soil" epidemics have struck down large percentages of populations that had no previous contact with newly introduced microbes. Written by a specialist in the history of science and medicine, the essays in this volume discuss pandemics and epidemics affecting Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, covering diseases in ancient times to the present. Each entry combines biological and social information to form a picture of the significance of epidemics that have shaped world history.
The essays cover the areas of major pandemics, virgin soil epidemics, disruptive shocks, and epidemics of symbolic interest. Included are facts about what an epidemic was, where and when it occurred, how contemporaries reacted, and the unresolved historical issues remaining. This fascinating material is written at a level suitable for scholars and the general public.
Culture is well recognized as an important basis for understanding psychological processes and behavior. Culturally informed research in psychology continues to supplement and challenge traditional knowledge in mainstream psychology in many ways, making culture a major topic of relevance for students and professionals in all areas of psychology. This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology conveys the impact that the contributions of cultural and cross-cultural psychology have made to the field’s understanding of the relation between culture and psychology. Divided into six parts, this book provides a unique account of the current state of cultural and cross-cultural psychology across a wide range of topics at the highest scholarly level. The chapters in this volume, written by leading scholars in the field, represent topics most relevant to culture and psychology, most exemplary of the work in the entire field, and most representative of the evolution of cross-cultural method and knowledge. Each chapter presents state-of-the art reviews of the theoretical and empirical literature in each topic area, going well beyond encyclopedic reviews of the existing research to objectively evaluate the literature. All contributors also present their visions of the future in their areas and outline work to guide researchers in future decades. While some chapters are careful updates from the first edition of this book, others are completely new rewrites given the evolution of new research. Nine other chapters are entirely new to this edition. In all, the book represents the collective wisdom of the leading thinkers and researchers in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. It is the only resource of its kind in the field and will serve as a valuable reference and guide for beginning researchers and scholars alike.
This volume is the first major attempt to systematically examine the etiology of violence in American Indian communities. Using fieldwork as well as quantitative and qualitative research, Bachman first presents an overview of American Indians from historical and contemporary perspectives, before she focuses specifically on violence and its causes. Homicide, suicide, and family violence are analyzed in depth, and the destructive impacts of alcohol and other addictive substances are documented.
Dr. Bachman effectively uses personal stories and narratives given by American Indians to illustrate the living reality behind the statistics she presents. She concludes with a variety of policy recommendations that will be of interest not only to policymakers, but also to academic researchers and students in criminology, ethnic relations, sociology, and anthropology.
There are certain phenomena, such as hypnosis, hysteria, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory syndrome, claims of satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction syndrome, and culture-specific disorders that, although common, are difficult to explain completely. The purpose of this volume is to apply a model of social relations to these phenomena in order to provide a different explanation for them. Wenegrat argues that they are socially constructed illness roles or purposive behavior patterns into which patients fall while receiving either unintentional or intentional cues during interactions with caretakers and authority figures. The application of the social-relations model raises some important, yet previously overlooked, questions about these phenomena. It also illustrates some important aspects of human nature and consciousness, places illness behaviors in their larger, cultural context, and shows the way to a new and different view of mental life.
This text examines the fads and fallacies, both past and present, that have plagued psychiatric diagnosis, treatments and research. It argues that such practices have led to an over-diagnosis of conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, PTSD and autism. It examines the over-treatment of psychiatric disorders with pharmaceuticals, and asks if neuroscience will actually hold the answers to the biggest questions in the field. Thoroughly updated in light of new research, this new edition addresses some of the more recent developments in psychiatry, including behavioural genetics, genome-wide association studies, and brain imaging. It looks at new advances in psychotherapies and argues for a broad biopsychosocial model. The book will inform psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, other mental health professionals, and medical students of the limits of mental health practice and the importance of adopting cautious conservatism and the principles of evidence-based practice.
Cultural Transmission covers psychological, developmental, social, and methodological research on how cultural information is socially transmitted from one generation to the next within families. Studying processes of cultural transmission may help analyze the continuity or change of cultures, including those that have to cope with migration or the collapse of a political system. An evolutionary perspective is elaborated in the first part of the book; the second takes a cross-cultural perspective by presenting international research on development and intergenerational relations in the family; the third provides intra-cultural analyses of mechanisms and methodological aspects of cultural transmission. Made up of contributions by experts in the field, this source book is intended for anyone with interests in cultural issues – especially researchers and teachers in disciplines such as psychology, social and behavioral sciences, and education – and for applied professionals in culture management and family counseling, as well as professionals dealing with migrants.
The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.
This book discusses suicide among Inuit in Arctic Canada and what their communities have done to attempt to prevent it. A thesis of this book is that suicide and other social problems among Inuit are caused by the imperialism/colonialism of the Canadian government, with the most negative effect being a dramatic change in Inuit relationships with each other, especially family relationships. When the family is changed in a family-based collectivist culture, many problems arise. Cases of suicidal youth are discussed. Then the book focuses on the positive aspect that when Inuit communities design and run their own activities for suicide prevention, suicides are prevented. Such stories need to be told in order to help indigenous communities with suicide prevention.
PM Yap’s most significant intellectual achievement was his development of the concept of the culture-bound syndrome, which synthesized years of research into transcultural psychiatry, and situated this work within this field by drawing on elaborated nosological schema that challenged some of the ethnocentric assumptions made by previous psychiatrists who had tried to understand mental illnesses that presented in non-western cultures. This introduction to Yap’s 1951 paper emphasizes that Yap needs to be understood as working within the western tradition of transcultural psychiatry, and argues that his English training and his continual engagement with western psychiatric and philosophical frameworks is the best way to conceive of his contributions to this field. Yap’s paper, republished below as the Classic Text, was his first foray into comparative transcultural psychiatry.
Despite its enduring insights, Durkheim’s theory of suicide fails to account for a significant set of cases because of its overreliance on structural forces to the detriment of other possible factors. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the role of culture in vulnerability to suicide. We argue that by focusing on the cultural dynamics of excessive regulation, particularly at the meso level, a more robust sociological model for suicide could be offered that supplements structure-heavy Durkheimian theory. In essence, we argue that the relevance of cultural regulation to suicide rests on the (1) degree to which culture is coherent in sociocultural places, (2) existence of directives related to prescribing or proscribing suicide, (3) degree to which these directives translate into internalized meanings affecting social psychological processes, and (4) degree to which the social space is bounded. We then illustrate how our new theory provides useful insights into three cases of suicide largely neglected within sociology: specifically, suicide clusters in high schools, suicide in the military, and suicides of “despair” among middle-aged white men. We conclude with implications for future sociological research on suicide and suicide prevention.
The development of psychology as a science and the struggle for scientific recognition has disrupted the need to interrogate the discipline and the profession from the perspective of the humanities, the arts, and the concept-driven social sciences. This article suggests that some of the humanities contribute significantly to an understanding of human subjectivity, arguably a core topic within psychology. The article outlines the relevance of the psychological humanities by reclaiming subjectivity as a core topic for general psychology that is grounded in theoretical reconstruction, integration, and advancement. The argument relies on a variety of disciplines to achieve a deeper understanding of subjectivity: Philosophy provides conceptual clarifications and guidelines for integrating research on subjectivity; history reconstructs the movement of subjectivity and its subdivisions; political and social theories debate the process of subjectification; indigenous, cultural, and postcolonial studies show that Western theories of subjectivity cannot be applied habitually to contexts outside of the center; the arts corroborate the idea that subjective imagination is core to the aesthetic project; and science and technology studies point to recent developments in genetic science and information technology, advances that necessitate the consideration of significant changes in subjectivity. The implications of the psychological humanities as an important, justifiable tradition in psychology and for a general theory of subjectivity are discussed.
The World Health Organization states that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and predicts that by 2030 the epidemic of depression raging across the world will be the single biggest contributor to the overall burden of disease of all health conditions. Yet this gloomy picture masks a number of paradoxes concerning the diagnosis and cultural interpretation of depression that appear to challenge the claimed prevalence rates on which it is based. This book’s essays by some of the world’s leading researchers and scholars on depression explores these anomalies in detail from multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives, and in doing so reshapes the debate on the nature of depression that is currently under way in the US and abroad. At the book’s core is the exploration from the multiple perspectives of a key dilemma: is the epidemic of depression real or is it just apparent? In particular, could it be the result of criteria laid down in the official American classification system of mental disorders, the DSM, interacting with cultural changes to reshape our view of melancholy, pathologizing what were formerly normal symptoms of grief or intense sadness? The debate over the DSM's conception of depression has an international relevance, with the WHO’s upcoming revisions to its International Classification of Diseases requiring coordination with the DSM. This collection of perspectives has an unprecedented international dimension, as scholars from Europe and around the world join US academics to explore a central and controversial element of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis - and one that has enormous practical implications for the future of mental health care and how we view our emotions. The book’s accessible essays will make it useful to scholars, practitioners, and students across a wide range of disciplines.
This paper was developed with the aim of shedding light on the phenomenology of suicide, that is, to focus on suicide as a phenomenon affecting a unique individual with unique motives for the suicidal act. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view. To explore this topic, the author looks back at the past centuries to understand why suicide was thought to be confined to psychiatric illness and to document the bias in studies supporting this notion. One major step forward in the conceptualization of suicide as a psychological disorder was provided by Edwin Shneidman. This essay goes over clues in the phenomenology of suicide.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s led to an explosion of research and debate about the imitative capacities of the human brain. Some herald a paradigm shift on the order of DNA in biology, while others remain skeptical. In this revolutionary volume Jean-Michel Oughourlian shows how the hypotheses of René Girard can be combined with the insights of neuroscientists to shed new light on the “mimetic brain.” Offering up clinical studies and a complete reevaluation of classical psychiatry, Oughourlian explores the interaction among reason, emotions, and imitation and reveals that rivalry-the blind spot in contemporary neuroscientific understandings of imitation-is a misunderstood driving force behind mental illness. Oughourlian’s analyses shake the very foundations of psychiatry as we know it and open up new avenues for both theoretical research and clinical practice.
A recent study reported season of birth variation in CSF levels of 5-HIAA and HVA, with low 5-m for February to April and high HVA for October to January (Chotai & Asberg, 1999). We therefore analysed data on all completed suicides during 1952–1993 in the county of Västerbotten in northern Sweden (1466 cases), regarding these birth seasons in relation to suicide method and sociodemographic variables. Those with suicide age under 45 years were more likely than older suicides to have been born during February to April, significantly so compared to October to January. This was more pronounced for the later birth-year cohort (born in 1931 or later). Those who preferred hanging rather than poisoning or petrol gases were significantly more likely born during February to April. Those who preferred poisoning rather than hanging were significantly more likely born during October to January, particularly for the later birth-year cohort. The results regarding suicide method were somewhat more pronounced for males. The results of the study are compatible with a hypothesis of season of birth variation in CSF monoamine metabolites.