The Heaviness

Worldwide, most people know someone who has considered suicide; this person might be themselves. Too many know someone who has died by suicide. Yet, even as one of the most human public health crises we face, inquiry into suicide and its prevention strategies exist in a binary: stiff clinical terms or deeply personal stories. My poem “The Heaviness” offers an incisive, emotional, and experiential bridge between the two—an attempt to recenter the humanity at the core of understanding and preventing suicide.

The topic of suicide is often presented and studied as an individual person’s issue within psychology and the biomedical sciences. These disciplines have had a profound influence on suicide research, treatment, and prevention approaches, such as the language used in campaigns, messaging, organizations, and social media. Suicide research within these fields tends to ask: “Is there something wrong with suicidal people?” without asking, “Is there something wrong with the world in which they live?”

Sociology has wrestled more deeply with understanding suicide and enhancing the efficacy of suicide prevention, addressing the broader impacts of society and culture—inequity, intersectionality, and the roles of organizations, for example—on human behavior. However, compared to psychology and the biomedical sciences, sociological studies have played a smaller role in how suicide is framed and talked about in the literature and in suicide prevention efforts.

In 1897, Émile Durkheim’s Suicide: A Study in Sociology considered suicide as occurring within a society’s social, moral, and economic factors, describing it as either altruistic, egoistic, anomic, or fatalistic. As the founder of suicidology, Durkheim was the first to explore increasing suicide rates as a “symptom of collective breakdown of society.” He further believed that population and public health projects were best posed to protect individual well-being, improving both social integration and regulation.

Within anthropology, scholars are asking urgent questions about how researchers can study suicide holistically, ethically, and safely for all parties. For example, in their paper “Methodological Proposal for Studying Suicide as a Complex Phenomenon,” Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo, Fátima Gonçalves Cavalcante, and Edinilsa Ramos de Souza write that “few studies have simultaneously examined the individual, social, anthropological, and epidemiological aspects of suicide.” Of course, there are complex ethical and methodological difficulties, such as speaking to relatives and discussing trauma in interviews.

In Suicide: Reflections on Medical Anthropology Research of Suffering, medical anthropologist Stefan Ecks asks: “How can suffering caused by suicide be examined as phenomenon (sic) in social context?” Suicide is notoriously difficult to study because it is a fatal outcome with multiple pathways to behavior, intermittent risk, and several biological, psychological, and social factors that impact measuring it.

Although these clear calls to action for studying suicide exist and circulate within anthropology, there is a critical need for anthropological poetry to complement suicide research, which my poem posits. In “The Heaviness,” I consider suicide as anthropological, social, and political in a world where its treatment and prevention methods are built around the assumption of an individual’s mental illness.

The poem explores how not all people who consider, attempt, or die by suicide are afflicted by pathological, neurochemical imbalances. Societal-level trauma is often carried somatically between generations, and suicidal thoughts as a response to these experiences aren’t necessarily as “irrational” as we’re generally told mental illness is.

In addition, “The Heaviness” narrates the unrelenting grip of learned helplessness when the system that leads people to crisis further criminalizes and shames them when they consider, attempt, or die by suicide. In the U.S., limited options for mental health crisis responses—typically 911 or the emergency room—disproportionately harm those who are BIPOC, who are already unduly impacted by multigenerational traumas that stem from historical oppression.

Further, this poem notes that although lived experience (as a suicide loss or attempt survivor, for example) is common and often necessary in advocacy, writing, and participatory action research, these engagements ask a lot of survivors. For example, participatory action research centers the members of communities most impacted by that research. They may be part of the research design, data collection, or the dissemination of outcomes. Asking someone to re-give voice and life to their experience in such a way often requires them to pick the scabs of their deepest wounds.

Another example of the profound “ask” we have of others is among mental health care professionals and mental health advocates/activists who are trained in suicide prevention methods. Just because people are “experts” via their education and training doesn’t mean they can’t and don’t struggle with suicidal thoughts and behavior. In many cases, their work is intimately wound with their lived experience.

Durkheim’s attempt to argue that a broken society causes painful behavior fell short because though critical, the systemic link between the two is difficult to quantify. In the context of suicide, anthropological poetry is perhaps the only place where this tension between academia, society, and lived experience can be explored in a way that moves the discussion forward. As beautifully stated in SAPIENS by inaugural Poet-in-Residence Justin D. Wright and Christine Weeber, the magazine’s poetry editor:

Exploring suicidology’s depth via anthropological poetry offers a way to move past the assumed clinical conceptualization and personalization of suicide embedded within much suicide prevention messaging and research, which, as stated by Daniel Münster and Ludek Broz,

Within the context of suicide, poetry provides language, voice, and a medium to avoid further marginalization. It can help tear down ethnographic assumptions about agency, disability, personhood, death, free will, authorship, power, and suffering. Poems about suicide can empower all of us to highlight the stories and experiences of political, social, and economic injustice that breed suicidality.

To close the poem, I come back to the vitality of hope when we fight for our own and one another’s lives each day, noting that pain and love are intertwined and equally heavy to carry. Poet Anne Sexton elegantly captured this when she stated, “suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem,” which I include in verse alongside a few poignant lyrics from musician Johnathan Larson’s “Louder Than Words.”

Editors’ Note: This final version builds on an earlier, shorter draft of the poem published at Unsinkable.