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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents PhD research findings exploring experiences of grief while engaging with psychiatric institutional care practices. Drawing on a case study, it discusses self-harm as a way to break silences forming against medicalised discourses of care and processing deaths by suicide.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents PhD research findings exploring experiences of suicide bereavement and self-harming behaviour as a way to break silences. This research understands silence to manifest as a relational form of tension between two sensed elements, however subtle in its affect. It is experienced as a polysemic phenomenon fundamental to understanding meanings within a society.

This paper discusses the case of Regan, an individual engaging in self-harming behaviours. Taking an ethnographic approach, it explores manifestations of silence before and after his wife's death by suicide. It draws on semi-structured interviews and observations, including reflections on his time spent within a clinical mental health setting.

My research findings suggest self-harming behaviour may communicate unresolved emotions and trauma memories. For instance, Regan described self-cutting that progressively transformed into a ritualistic act in honour of his wife, who would cut before her death by suicide. Additionally, Regan disclosed accounts of living with schizophrenia and talked about subsequent medical interventions and experiences of psychosis that flattened emotion and affect. In this instance, silence forms with and against medicalised discourses and limitations in symbolic expression through language while processing emotional experiences concerning trauma memories, suicide bereavement, psychosis and self-harm. This paper argues that self-harm may signal the breaking of silence that serves to communicate experiences of fracture and disruption outside of language.