Reflections

Please put your own mask on first, before helping others: taking care of suicide researcher’s mental health and wellbeing

Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels

As suicide researchers we inevitably think about suicide (virtually) every day. We spend our time reading, writing and thinking about the saddest and darkest times in other people’s, and sometimes our own, lives. We want to understand these experiences, we want to improve these difficult times, and we want to enhance the support available to mitigate these difficulties. We invest huge amounts of time and energy into considering the ethical complexities of designing and undertaking this research to safeguard the wellbeing of our participants and, when it’s done, we reflect on whether we have done enough and on what more we could do. It is fair to say that suicide research inevitably comes with a range of emotional demands.

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Reflections

The Qualities of Qualitative Suicide Research

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

As suicide research is dominated by quantitative studies [1] [2], whenever I come across a new qualitative paper in suicidology, it’s exciting! This is how I first felt when I came across What Can We Learn From First-Person Narratives?” The Case of Nonfatal Suicidal Behavior by Bantjes and Swartz [3]. Reading the paper, I went through a full range of emotions, which is why I recently recommended it for discussion in our research group’s critical suicide studies reading group back in February and why I wanted to write this blog.

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