Healing from Suicide: How Suicide Disclosures Can Facilitate Social Integration and Healing

Abstract

Despite rising suicide rates in the United States, we know little about how people experience suicidality and how they access healing from suicidality. Using semistructured interviews with 102 suicide survivors—those who have seriously considered and/or attempted suicide—I ask: How do suicide survivors make sense of suicide disclosures, and what generates healing from suicidality? Using a micro-sociological Durkheimian framework, these data suggest that when suicide disclosures share two elements, narrative freedom and an empathetic audience, they facilitate social integration and thereby promote healing. Narrative freedom occurs when survivors have the agency to construct their own disclosures; an empathetic audience receives disclosures with understanding. Together, these two characteristics promote a micro-sociological social integration, which, in turn, facilitates healing from suicidality. These findings contribute to the sociology of suicide by applying Durkheim’s integration at the interpersonal level and highlighting the social factors that promote healing rather than solely risk.