Background:
Suicide occupies an ambiguous, politicized, and morally fraught space at the nexus of violence, voluntary death, and murder. Although largely absent from the cultural anthropological literature, recent suicide scholarly inquiry has raised deep questions about human nature, culture, and sociality. Such investigations have exposed important heterogeneity in local discourse of suicide, shaping different moralities, perceptions, and justifications for suicide deaths. Such discourse shapes the ways the living ascribe motivation and meaning to certain. Research from anthropology and allied fields indicates that predominantly western archetypes of psychopathology, which underlie suicide categorization in health systems, may distort important socio-contextual factors contributing to suicide. Recently, the World Health Organization estimated Nepal to have the third highest female suicide rate in the world, and ranks eighth highest overall. However, little research has explicitly with suicide in particular, and that which does focuses explicitly on demographic correlates and hospital-based data. The current study sought to explore cultural practices, perceptions, and experiences with suicide in order to develop an explanatory model of suicidal behavior in the Nepali-context.
Methods: Ethnographic field methods were employed over twenty months of field work. Sixty semi-structured interviews were conducted throughout twenty months of fieldwork in Nepal with both community members (n=30) and health professionals (n=30). To maximize variation, we sampled from two field sites: urban Kathmandu and Jumla, a rural western district. Interviews evoked perceived etiologies of suicide and suicidal behavior, associated stigma, legal consequences, gender implications, and care seeking pathways. Textual data was analyzed through iterative discourse and content analysis.
Results:
In this paper, we discuss three issues: the ethnopsychology of suicide in Nepal, perceptions related to causal mechanisms for and consequences of suicidal behavior, and the role of the derived explanatory model for suicide in public health prevention efforts. Findings may have important applications for the understanding of suicidal behavior outside the western-context and subsequent prevention strategies in South Asia.