Queer Youth Suicide Research Articles

An Integrated Conceptual Model to Understand Suicidality among Queer Youth to Inform Suicide Prevention.

In this article, we apply and combine elements from four theoretical frameworks (i.e., Minority Stress Theory, Person-in-Environment and Risk and Resilience Framework, Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide, and Intersectionality) to explain the problem of queer youth suicide through our integrated conceptual model, Queer Prevention of Youth Suicidality Model (Queer-PRYSM). The need for this conceptual model is based on the current state of the literature, including mixed empirical findings on factors related to queer youth suicidality, no scholarly consensus on specific contributing factors regarding high rates of suicidality among queer youth (including queer youth subgroups), and the absence of a unifying theory to explain the queer youth suicide risk. To address these limitations in theory, evidence, and scholarship explaining suicidality among queer youth we present our integrated model with growing, current, relevant research with queer youth. Queer-PRYSM includes minority stressors specific to queer youth, mental health problems, interpersonal-psychological factors, socioecological factors (i.e., family, school, peers, and community), and intersectionality concepts. Queer-PRYSM is essential to understanding the relationship of distal and proximal risk and protective factors in queer youth suicide and developing evidence-informed suicide preventive interventions that can be incorporated into practice, policy, and system structures.

The ethics of facing the Other in suicide.

Despite a plethora of existing literature on the topic of suicide, very little attention has been given to research ethics in practice in research on suicide. When suicide research does pay attention to the ethical issues researchers are likely to face, the focus is on the roles institutional human ethics review committees fulfil to ensure ethical conduct in all stages of research. In response to this problem, this article focuses on the philosophical relationship between qualitative methodology and research ethics in the context of researching queer youth suicide. In so doing, I draw on my experiences of interviewing gender-and sexually diverse young people about their familiarity with suicide. These experiences are based on a qualitative pilot study I conducted on queer youth suicide, which used the unstructured interview technique to collect data. Drawing on the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, I examine what it means to face the alterity of the suicidal 'Other', and what this facing entails in terms of research ethics as relational. I argue that facing reveals not only myself as more vulnerable than I anticipated, but also the suicidal 'Other' as agentic instead of only vulnerable and at-risk of suicide.

Subjective Connectivity: Rethinking Loneliness, Isolation and Belonging in Discourses of Minority Youth Suicide

ABSTRACT While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in much suicidology as having social and cultural causes. At the same time, contemporary media, film, television and other popular cultural representation of suicides of both youth and minorities present an account of suicidality grounded in issues related to loneliness, isolation and disconnection from contemporary sociality. Problematic among these depictions is that ‘ways of being connected’ (and therefore what counts as a liveable life) are understood principally through white, western, older-generational perspectives of what social connection means and how it is recognised. At the same time, such approaches often problematically conflate and interweave complex concepts of loneliness, aloneness, isolation, disengagement, disconnection and disintegration in the representation of forms of suicide causality. In the context of queer youth suicide, this paper (i) examines some examples of popular stereotypes of “suicide-causing loneliness, (ii) undertakes a new critical reading of Durkheim and Joiner’s writings on suicide as related to social disconnection and (iii) deploys theories of networked connectivity and social relationality to determine their efficacy in understanding minority youth dis-attachment in relation to Judith Butler’s approach to grievability, liveability and social belonging.

Queer Youth Suicide as Disruptive Revelation of God

This work positions queer youth suicide as deviant aperture into scandal within divine life through an ‘indecenting’ of kenotic agency located in the Incarnation itself. Refuting a heteronormative gaze that defines queer youth suicide as an expression of pathology, I present a disruptive coming out of God who redeems through scandal by posing these suicides as deaths for others. Drawing from two liberation theologians, I offer a construct of martyrdom within historical contexts of an excess of death that is capable of carrying the weight of their agency within a destructive heteronormative reality. Applying Althaus-Reid’s method of ‘indecenting’ within their last deviant act, both vitiated and vindicated in this kenotic agency of God, queer youth suicide becomes a preferred vehicle of divine delight and reclamation. Although disruptive, this divine eloquence spills out everywhere, cracking open a theological praxis where no one ever falls outside of God, especially in death.

Norms and normalisation: understanding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth, suicidality and help-seeking

Young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer transgender have elevated rates of suicidality. Despite the increased risk, there is a paucity of research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer help-seeking and suicidality. We report on a UK sequential exploratory, two-stage, mixed-method study. Stage 1 involved 29 online and face-to-face semi-structured interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth aged 16–25 years old. Stage 2 utilised an online youth questionnaire employing a community-based sampling strategy (n = 789). Results indicated that participants only asked for help when they reached a crisis point because they were normalising their emotional distress. Those who self-harmed, had attempted or planned suicide or had experience of abuse related to their sexuality or gender were most likely to seek help. Results suggested that the reluctance to seek help was due to three interconnecting factors: negotiating sexuality, gender, mental health and age norms; being unable to talk about emotions; and coping and self-reliance. Policies aiming to prevent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth suicide recognise that norms and normalising processes connected to sexual orientation and gender identity are additional difficulties that youth have accessing mental health support.

The School-to-Coffin Pipeline: Queer Youth, Suicide, and Living the In-Between

Written from the perspectives of a tenured high school teacher/researcher, an out bisexual sophomore, and a transgender senior, this article discusses the challenges of being and becoming an out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) student in a large, Midwestern high school. Through counternarratives, the authors explore what they call the school-to-coffin pipeline, a system that (un)intentionally positions LGBTQ teens in what has become a horrific, yet normalized, epidemic of queer youth suicide. The authors use the framework of this pipeline to examine what it means to live with/in the in-between of school rhetoric and a dearth of enacted school policy that could literally be life-saving for queer youth. Through an examination of the everyday challenges queer youth encounter, the authors argue that all adults involved in schooling—including teachers, teacher educators, administrators, counselors, and school psychologist—are necessarily (un)knowing participants in the school-to-coffin pipeline, contributing to institutional homophobia and, by extension, LGBTQ youth suicide. The authors argue that by attending to the school-to-coffin pipeline, those who contribute to it can begin to interrupt the current, and possibly continuing, cycle of self-inflicted violence on queer youth bodies.

Queer theory, neoliberal homonormativity and social utility for queer writing on youth (suicide)

Contemporary sexual citizenship is governed by neoliberal concepts of selfhood that both encourage subjects to manage their own risk and that establishes risks by creating hierarchies of affluence, self-commodity and belonging. These risks relate to the ways in which LGBT self-harm and sexuality-related suicide are conditioned and normalised, with continuing high rates of suicidality. While neo-liberal formations of sexual selfhood have created the conditions for writing and making sense of fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for the legalised expression and representation of non-heterosexuality, they continue and exacerbate risks that can lead to the cultural formations associated with youth suicide. The fact that non-heterosexual youth have traditionally made use of the ‘logics’ of non-normative sexuality given in queer writing calls for an ethical approach to the ways in which narratives of non-heteronormative sexuality are written. This article presents a framing account of how contemporary neoliberal forms of ‘homonormative’ queer cultures serve as a backdrop and context for queer creative representations that may be utilised as forms of support, frameworks for identity norms or projections of queer lives that can, arguably, exacerbate risks of suicide. It examines some of the ways in which we can come at the conditions that make queer youth suicide possible and thinkable from a queer culturalist angle, allowing us to consider how suicide risks are creatively represented, produced, or contributed to.

Sexuality: a psychosocial manifesto

The contemporary study of sexuality too often finds itself at an impasse, conceptualizing sexuality either psychologically or sociologically: sexologists and psychologists have tended to point to the biological origins of sexuality underpinned by hormones, drives and, most recently, genetics; in contrast, historians and sociologists point to the social field as the defining force that shapes the meanings given to sexuality and sexual experience. Confronting the limitations and challenges this impasse poses, Katherine Johnson argues for a psychosocial approach that rethinks the relationship between psychic and social realms in the field of sexuality, without reducing it to either. Weaving through an expanse of theoretical and empirical examples drawn from sociology, psychology, queer and cultural studies, she produces an innovative, transdisciplinary perspective on sexual identities, subjectivities and politics that makes an original contribution to key debates ranging from identity politics and gay marriage, to mental health 'risks' and queer youth suicide. Embracing ideas from developmental psychology, social constructionist sociology, social and critical psychology, psychoanalysis and queer theory, this original book will be necessary reading for students and scholars of sexuality across the social sciences.

Orgasmology / Love and money: queers, class, and cultural production / Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: unliveable lives?

It is by now a critical commonplace that sexuality is central to the production of modern subjectivity. But as Annamarie Jagose reminds us in Orgasmology, sexuality has also functioned throughout t...

Queer youth suicide and the psychopolitics of “It Gets Better”

This article investigates a mass-mediated campaign against a perceived increase in suicides among gay (or presumed-to-be-gay) youth in the USA since September 2010. “It Gets Better” (IGB) became a rallying cry for “anti-bullying” activists, politicians, celebrities and ordinary people who created YouTube videos addressed to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth who might be considering suicide. A critical discourse analysis of a sample of IGB videos reveals a neoliberal frame that places the burden of a “better” life onto the emotional lives of LGBT youth, who are instructed to endure suffering in the interest of inevitable happiness. Drawing on Foucault and Orr's work on the construction and management of mental illness, we use the concept of “psychopower” to explore how these IGB videos render queer youth suicide both a psychological disorder and a sociological crisis for which the only viable solution is “homonormative” subjectivity.

Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Book Review| February 01 2014 Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? By Rob Cover. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012; pp. xi + 150, $99.95 cloth. Whitney Gent Whitney Gent University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2014) 1 (1): 216–218. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0216 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Whitney Gent; Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 February 2014; 1 (1): 216–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.1.0216 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Conditions of Living: Queer Youth Suicide, Homonormative Tolerance, and Relative Misery

Despite the increasing social tolerance accorded nonheterosexual persons in many Western countries, queer youth suicide rates remain high. This opens the need to question not only how broad social conditions continue to make lives unlivable for many queer youth but whether queer community formations and representations that emerge within a tolerance framework provide supportive environments for fostering youth resilience. This article presents a theoretical approach to understanding the continuity of youth suicide by considering how queer community formations built on tolerance create new exclusions for some queer youth that can make a life unlivable in relation to peers. The article articulates the tolerance framework through a return to Dennis Altman's 40-year-old Homosexual Oppression and Liberation and the more recent “homonormativity” critique of queer politics. It examines how tolerance and homonormativity are implicated in exclusions and suicidality through the “relative misery” suicide thesis and the concept of frustrated aspiration.

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Rob Cover,Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Rob Cover,<i>Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?</i>

Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Contents: Preface Introduction: queer youth suicide, vulnerability and unliveable lives Queer suicide representations in popular media Histories and genealogies of suicide research and sexuality It gets better? Online representations of hope, vulnerability and resilience Reconstitutions: identity, subjectivity and the dominant discourses of sexuality Tensions: suicide, sexual identity and shame Community: homonormativity, exclusion and relative misery Conclusion: towards liveable lives Bibliography Filmography Index.

Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Some Gays and the Queers

Some Gays and the Queers

The Pistol in the Suitcase: Motive, Temporality, Queer Youth Suicide

The Pistol in the Suitcase: Motive, Temporality, Queer Youth Suicide Peter M. Coviello (bio) In the midst of the hypnotic, stylized gorgeousness of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is a scene about, among other things, reading. Or perhaps we should say that, like virtually every tranced scene in this fictionalized account of a Columbine-like high school massacre, it is a scene about motive: what we take motive to express, what we imagine its legible signs to be, and under what pressures we seek to transform those signs into various kinds of attribution. In it, the camera’s unblinking eye does a double turn around a basement room in which a teenaged boy—he is soon to become one of the shooters—plays Beethoven on an upright piano. At first, we are situated just to his left, close enough watch the contours of his face. [End Page 63] While he is playing, his friend and co-conspirator appears in the window above him, and as the camera turns away from the boy and around the basement space he inhabits we come to see that the friend has made his way into the room. The unbroken shot at last expires in a cut from the friend back to the young man at the piano. But what you might call the action of the nearly three-minute-long sequence resides not in the song’s performance, nor in any dialogue, nor in any of the incidental interaction between the two young men. In the place of any of these things there is, instead, something not unlike a Whitmanian catalogue in visual form: a small litany of quotidian objects unscrolling before the camera’s deliberate, unhurried gaze. And then, as the camera repeats its turn around the room, we see it all once again, as though invited to scrutinize still more closely, still more forensically, the landscape of adolescent detritus. “Fur Elise” swells and choruses, and this is what we see: trophies, cassettes, an inner room filled with storage boxes, a large painting and drawings affixed to the walls, an unmade bed, a camouflage backpack nestled against a soccer ball, a baseball mitt, a drawing of an elephant, stereo equipment, a pretty boy playing piano. In its level and omnivorous gaze, which identifies us as viewers with a position suspended disquietingly between that of the predator, the prosecutor, and the connoisseur, the film offers perhaps its most vivid address to the mystery of motive—which is also the promise of motive, of explanatory attribution—that is so much at the heart of Van Sant’s project. (“How can you tell?,” asks an adult in an earlier scene, at what appears to be a meeting of something like the high school’s meeting of queer-affiliated kids.) We are confronted, in essence, with pieces of evidence, but it is evidence assembled in a conspicuously undifferentiated, lateralized way. Presented as part of this dehierarchized sequence, each object here is shown to be rich with possible implication and, in the same lateralizing motion, utterly hollowed out, transformed into the interchangeable equivalent of any other isolated data point. To read the elephant in this particular room as the explanatory Rosetta Stone, the film reminds us, is no more credible, and no less, than seizing on the boys’ piano-playing, their video-gaming, their ostracization, their wardrobe, the Nazi documentary they watch, or—oh, yes—the fact that they share a kiss, and a naked embrace, in the shower in the lead up to the murders. Why not select the drawing of an elephant as your epiphanic text?, the film asks. Any item will do the work of motive attribution and will do so with an arbitrariness that no explication ever can fully banish. (This is what Heather N. Lukes means when, in her brilliant reading of the film, she writes, “The only element [End Page 64] Van Sant adds to the Columbine story is this homosexual element, but it is literally meaningless” [emphasis added].)1 There are video games, guns, queer embraces, elephants: an array of objects, any one of which can be grasped and made luminous with meaning, its significances expanded almost infinitely by the...

Mediating Suicide: Print Journalism and the Categorization of Queer Youth Suicide Discourses

This article undertakes textual analysis to examine some of the ways in which knowledge around sexuality-related youth suicide and its causes are produced and made available through news media discourses and news-making processes. Four categories of sexuality-related suicide discourses were identified in news stories and features over the past 20 years: statistical research that makes non-heterosexuality implicit as a cause of suicide; stories about deviancy,guilt, and shame; suicide survivor stories; and bullying/harassment of non-heterosexual persons by individuals in schools and other institutions as suicide cause. Through processes of news production and meaning-making, use of expert opinions of primary definers, experiential accounts, reliance on citations of quantitative data, private accounts given as entertainment, and the newsworthiness of suicide as drama, public knowledge on queer youth suicide is guided by contemporary journalism. In all cases, the underlying relationship between heteronormativity, mental health, depression, and despair were frequently excluded in news journalism on queer youth suicide.

The Chasm &amp; the Abyss: Queer Theory and the Socialities of Queer Youth Suicide

Poniższy artykuł używa teorii queer, aby dowieść, że istnieją konkurujące ze sobą socjalizacje, dyskursy oraz "platformy" seksualności, przy czym dominujące dyskursy seksualności, dla których warunkiem społecznej przynależności i uczestnictwa jest podmiotowość oparta na heteronormatywnej lub homonormatywnej socjalizacji, stanowią czynnik ryzyka w odniesieniu do samobójstw notowanych wśród młodzieży o nienormatywnej seksualności. Dokonując analizy raportu opisującego przypadek samobójstwa młodej osoby, artykuł korzysta z queerowych teorii podmiotowości, butlerowskiej performatywności oraz derridiańskiego odczytania „chory”, aby pokazać, jak odczuwana seksualność, której jednostka nie jest w stanie zintegrować z dominującymi dyskursami seksualności (co uniemożliwia podmiotowi wypracowanie spójności, czytelności i rozpoznawalności, będących podstawą poczucia społecznej przynależności), otwiera przepaść między współzawodniczącymi logikami seksualności, co z kolei może stanowić czynnik ryzyka prowadzący do samobójstw wśród queerowej młodzieży. Zdaniem autora, ryzyko samobójstwa spowodowanego (problemami z) seksualnością wśród młodzieży może zostać zredukowane poprzez artykulację queerowych, płynnych i polimorficznych pozytywności seksualnych oraz poszerzenie dostępnych dyskursów, platform, tożsamości oraz form socjalizacji ekspresji seksualnej.