Discursive construction of fatherly suicide

ABSTRACT

In this article we are interested in stories of sons and daughters about their fathers who completed suicide. The data come from 10 interviews with survivors of suicidal death of their fathers. Taking a constructionist view of discourse, we aim to analyse sons’ and daughters’ narratives in the context of two conflicting discourses of (positive) fatherhood and (negative) suicide. We shall show how they use the discursive strategies of distancing in the narratives about fathers’ suicide as a means of coping with the two conflicting discourses. And so, first, they avoid labelling the act as suicide, second, they avoid direct reference to the fact that it was their father who completed the act, third, they dilute the father’s responsibility for the act.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide survivors
• parental suicide
• father
• masculinity
• mental health
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Justyna Ziółkowska, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Psychology at University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS), Poland. Her research interests concentrate on experience of mental illness and discourses of psychiatric care.

Dariusz Galasiński, DSC, PhD, MA, is Professor of Discourse and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. His current research interests focus upon experience of mental illness.

Notes

1. As a way of destigmatising suicide and avoid connotations of criminality, we follow recommendations to speak of ‘completing’ rather than ‘committing suicide’. We left ‘commit’ only the cases where our informants used it.

2. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Wroclaw Faculty of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.

3. Finally, we have chosen to represent our informants with a uniform ‘I’ (for interviewee), rather than fictional first names as often is the practice in the literature or fictional initials. The interviewer is referred to by her actual initials (MD). This is for two reasons. First, the interviewer was not on first name basis with the informants (the default address form for adults in Polish is the polite form pan/pani, the equivalent of German Sie or Spanish Usted), also because we have an impression that referring to informants, adult people, only by first names (fictional or not) is, especially in the Polish context, slightly patronising and to a certain extent at least puts them in a position of lower or inferior status. Second, fictitious initials might actually give false appearances as to people’s identities. Thus, in order to protect the privacy of our informants we have decided to anonymise their stories and identities completely.

4. The English ‘authority’ is ambiguous as regards translation into Polish. In the particular context the informants used the word autorytet, a noun referring to someone whose knowledge, experience etc. is worth following. It always has positive connotations.

5. The original contains Polish wiadomo whose closest translation should be rendered as ‘it is known’, which is quite cumbersome. We have decided to use ‘obviously’ as a functional equivalent.

6. The speaker uses Polish ‘człowiek’.

7. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to the problem.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (ncn.gov.pl) under grant SONATA 2012/05/D/HS6/02390.