Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Krmpotic, Claudia Sandra
Palleiro, María Inés
Materias
Spatial Coverage
Idioma
spa
Extent
296 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
ARG
Abstract
In contemporary Argentina the phenomenon of youth suicide is increasing. Faced with the expectation for young people to project their lives to achieve adult status and integrate into the production and the labor market, the explanation of their deaths generates disputes.
Suicide has been presented as something difficult to explain. In the different disciplinary approaches that have built explanations regarding suicide –some of them have been devoted specifically to the study of youthful suicide- notions have been formulated linking together the ways we understand youth, death, life and suicide. In order to understand these, since this is a topic that is so directly linked to death, beliefs loom large.
In this research project we sought to understand the current beliefs about youth suicide. Belief is a modality of certainty and a cognitive mode. It results from mental activity that finds a vehicle of expression in narrative as a cognitive form of organization of experience. It expresses the subject’s position in respect to a state of affairs whose truth value is sustained from personal or interpersonal adherence. Certain statements are accepted as true, by means of subjective operations of assertion or affirmation.
After getting to know various disquisitions related to this topic, it has become clear that there are argumentative intersections between at least two types of them: the religious explanation and the scientific approach. This can be thought of not only from the sacralization of the issue of death, but from the same interrelationship between science and religion if one reflects on the limits of the secularization process of scientific knowledge, considering that scientific explanations did not completely differ from theological explanations. (Löwith, 2007; Feyerabend, 1986; Agamben, 2003, 2008; Girard, René, 2006).
Based on this understanding -that the boundaries between the secular and the religious are permeable-, it is not only interesting but necessary to understand the system of beliefs around youth suicide, highlighting these argumentative intersections that make scientific and theological approaches fields interrelated and mutually influential.
The pursuit of these beliefs has been developed in the thesis out of published materials from four groups: health professionals, sociologists, existentialist philosophers and Baptist theologians.
In the thesis we particularly focus on religious explanations among which the theological ones only reveal the religious elites’ perspectives, and not necessarily those of parishioners. In order to broaden the understanding we conducted a thorough ethnographic study among Baptists. This group emerges from the Anabaptist movement in England after the Reformation. Selection criteria are listed later on.
At this time we will only present a case study that is part of the aforementioned ethnographic study on the conceptions of suicide and related interventions.
Among the most significant findings some core beliefs stand out because of their frequency. Suicide is a process that begins with ideation. Death is premeditated, deliberate. Suicide is an act that breaks with rationality. At the origin of suicide there is a decision to stop something that can hardly be the very existence of the subject who dies. The factors leading to suicide are divided into two groups: predisposing and triggering factors. The latter are always social. By the depth of their impact they precipitate the passage to the act of suicide, without full responsibility for the act of suicide. It is believed that without the presence of predisposing elements, even with the same trigger episodes, suicide would not be completed.
Guilt, pain, lack of peace, unforgiveness, rejection and self-rejection, all widely mentioned notions in scientific argumentation, are denominated as spiritual aspects by having recourse to terminologies that are more typical of religious discourse.. While the implications of these terms have variations, they are the same in scientific and religious discourse. These and other relationships find their highest expression in the words of the young people themselves, of which Antonella’s narrative bears witness.
In the analyzed texts and testimonies, family has a leading role in triggering suicide: unstable, extremely rigid, abandonic, violent, absent families. Fundamentally, families who do not care for, do not integrate [their children].
A foundational belief found in study materials is that suicide risk can be prevented. Prevention is based on the belief that in no case is death the solution to life’s problems. In the face of consummated suicide, there is nothing to do except preventing a copycat effect and negative effects on the deceased young person's environment. That is why proposals are organized around prevention as the only possible intervention.
In both the religious and scientific approaches there is a belief in the effectiveness of preventive action in formal school settings as well as in education in other social spaces.
Caring for young people should also be directed at the solution of the vital problems that make it impossible for them to go on living: reversing school failure, giving second chances; finding a solution for unemployment, reducing inequality, strengthening families, creating groups young people feel they can identify with.
Throughout the work we can see that the difference between the various fields under analysis cannot be very distinctly defined. Intersections are multiple between explanations and the beliefs that become evident.
Suicide has been presented as something difficult to explain. In the different disciplinary approaches that have built explanations regarding suicide –some of them have been devoted specifically to the study of youthful suicide- notions have been formulated linking together the ways we understand youth, death, life and suicide. In order to understand these, since this is a topic that is so directly linked to death, beliefs loom large.
In this research project we sought to understand the current beliefs about youth suicide. Belief is a modality of certainty and a cognitive mode. It results from mental activity that finds a vehicle of expression in narrative as a cognitive form of organization of experience. It expresses the subject’s position in respect to a state of affairs whose truth value is sustained from personal or interpersonal adherence. Certain statements are accepted as true, by means of subjective operations of assertion or affirmation.
After getting to know various disquisitions related to this topic, it has become clear that there are argumentative intersections between at least two types of them: the religious explanation and the scientific approach. This can be thought of not only from the sacralization of the issue of death, but from the same interrelationship between science and religion if one reflects on the limits of the secularization process of scientific knowledge, considering that scientific explanations did not completely differ from theological explanations. (Löwith, 2007; Feyerabend, 1986; Agamben, 2003, 2008; Girard, René, 2006).
Based on this understanding -that the boundaries between the secular and the religious are permeable-, it is not only interesting but necessary to understand the system of beliefs around youth suicide, highlighting these argumentative intersections that make scientific and theological approaches fields interrelated and mutually influential.
The pursuit of these beliefs has been developed in the thesis out of published materials from four groups: health professionals, sociologists, existentialist philosophers and Baptist theologians.
In the thesis we particularly focus on religious explanations among which the theological ones only reveal the religious elites’ perspectives, and not necessarily those of parishioners. In order to broaden the understanding we conducted a thorough ethnographic study among Baptists. This group emerges from the Anabaptist movement in England after the Reformation. Selection criteria are listed later on.
At this time we will only present a case study that is part of the aforementioned ethnographic study on the conceptions of suicide and related interventions.
Among the most significant findings some core beliefs stand out because of their frequency. Suicide is a process that begins with ideation. Death is premeditated, deliberate. Suicide is an act that breaks with rationality. At the origin of suicide there is a decision to stop something that can hardly be the very existence of the subject who dies. The factors leading to suicide are divided into two groups: predisposing and triggering factors. The latter are always social. By the depth of their impact they precipitate the passage to the act of suicide, without full responsibility for the act of suicide. It is believed that without the presence of predisposing elements, even with the same trigger episodes, suicide would not be completed.
Guilt, pain, lack of peace, unforgiveness, rejection and self-rejection, all widely mentioned notions in scientific argumentation, are denominated as spiritual aspects by having recourse to terminologies that are more typical of religious discourse.. While the implications of these terms have variations, they are the same in scientific and religious discourse. These and other relationships find their highest expression in the words of the young people themselves, of which Antonella’s narrative bears witness.
In the analyzed texts and testimonies, family has a leading role in triggering suicide: unstable, extremely rigid, abandonic, violent, absent families. Fundamentally, families who do not care for, do not integrate [their children].
A foundational belief found in study materials is that suicide risk can be prevented. Prevention is based on the belief that in no case is death the solution to life’s problems. In the face of consummated suicide, there is nothing to do except preventing a copycat effect and negative effects on the deceased young person's environment. That is why proposals are organized around prevention as the only possible intervention.
In both the religious and scientific approaches there is a belief in the effectiveness of preventive action in formal school settings as well as in education in other social spaces.
Caring for young people should also be directed at the solution of the vital problems that make it impossible for them to go on living: reversing school failure, giving second chances; finding a solution for unemployment, reducing inequality, strengthening families, creating groups young people feel they can identify with.
Throughout the work we can see that the difference between the various fields under analysis cannot be very distinctly defined. Intersections are multiple between explanations and the beliefs that become evident.
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales