Connection and Isolation: A Relational Perspective

Abstract

Research on suicidality has often engaged with themes of connection and isolation, and these themes were taken up in our earlier work too (Roen et al., 2008). It was Durkheim (1952 [1897]) who first theorised suicide in relation to social context and social bonds, with the understanding that many instances of suicide can be attributed to people feeling lost or alone (anomic suicide) or to a weakening of social bonds (egoistic suicide). In more recent decades, Pritchard has suggested that a person who is experiencing suicidal distress may feel rejected. The person then rejects the unresolved pain and rejects the immediate world with its troubles. The family shares this ultimate rejection, because the person did not apparently value them sufficiently to want to live (Pritchard, 1995). Here, Pritchard presents social connectedness as key to understanding and preventing suicide. Fullagar also indicates that social connectedness seems to be crucial, suggesting that suicide may be understood as something that happens ‘where connectedness is severed’ (Fullagar, 2003: 300). The idea that a suicide attempt is a cry for connection has also been developed by some researchers (Bettridge and Favreau, 1995; Canetto, 1997). Based on our own previous research concerning young people’s understandings of youth suicide, we have come to understand that it is not primarily psychological states (or mental illness) that are the key to understanding suicide. Rather, suicidal acts may be understood as ways of responding to a psychosocial dilemma. This dilemma concerns ‘the desperate need for connection with others in tension with the inevitable difficulties inherent in that connection’ (Roen et al, 2008: 2096).