Abstract
“It’s like I have so much pain inside, it’s kinda like I cry inside. It’s kind of hard to explain. But like, I guess when I cut myself, I feel like I’m letting out endless words. I’m taking out my pain” (p. 112).
“Endless” words are exactly what Luis Zayas captures, encapsulates, and explicates in this study of adolescent Latina suicidality. Since the 1950s, health professionals have struggled to unpack the underlying causes for a pattern of adolescent pan-Latina suicide attempts that spiked in 1995, with 1 in 5 American-born girls of immigrants, or 21% (now 1 in 7 girls), attempting suicide. Zayas persisted in grantwriting for more than 10 years before he received funding from National Institutes of Health to study this “elephant in the living room.”
Latinas Attempting Suicide is a culturally grounded social work study focused on the relational worlds of Latina girls and their families within the context of immigration and acculturation. These girls are caught between two worlds and two adolescences, “with a foot in two cultures” as they struggle to survive inner-city poverty, the trauma and loss of immigration, and the pressures of maintaining their beliefs and values in a hostile and alien environment.
Zayas places this pattern of suicide attempts, frequently with dissociative qualities, within a framework of a cultural idiom of distress: “the suicide attempt represents a means provided by culture through which the girls can communicate what is happening to them, in them and around them” (p. 146). The act embodies a relational disruption of familism, of placing the family at the center of one’s life, ahead of individual interests where members are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the family. Zayas points to how Western ideas of individualism are at odds with this cultural value and posits a paradigm shift to a culturally grounded practice model that is consonant with Latino beliefs and traditions.
Zayas locates the underlying stressors that lead to suicide in the dialectics between autonomy and connectedness/relatedness and family cohesiveness and flexibility/adaptability. In 75% of the attempts, the girls indicated that the triggers were fights with their mothers and boyfriends over dating and sexuality (p. 65). An increase in mutuality, or perspective taking, between a girl and her mother leads to a 50% drop in the odds that she would make an attempt: “a small dose of improved sense of emotional attunement between mother and daughter, which commonly comes as a result of improved communication, affection, and experience of support, can possibly prevent a suicide attempt” (p. 110). The mothers of suicide attempters perceive themselves to be attuned to their daughters, although the daughters disagree, whereas the mothers of nonattempters say they are attuned, and their daughters agree. Zayas also found that when girls are sensitive and aware of the values of their Latino culture, they are less likely to make an attempt. In short, Zayas demonstrates that the issue needs to be understood from a culturally grounded perspective and one of mutuality between mother and daughter.