The ethics of facing the Other in suicide

Introduction

The aim of this article is to examine the philosophical relationship between qualitative methodology and research ethics in the context of researching queer youth suicide. Indeed, the role of research ethics has been debated extensively in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and social psychology, to name a few. Much of the discussion has focussed on the politics of gaining ethical clearance from institutional human ethics review committees. Despite their necessity, researchers remain critical of ethics committees, arguing that they are largely science driven, and therefore ill-suited to making decisions about ethical issues in qualitative research (Holland, 2007; Juritzen et al., 2011; Paoletti et al., 2013; Schrag, 2011; Vadeboncoeur et al., 2016). As a result of this critique, attention has shifted to how ‘ethical principles are mediated within different research practices and thus take on different significances in relation to those practices’ (Simons and Usher, 2000: 1). ‘Ethics in practice’ (Ellis, 2007: 4), or ‘context-based ethics’ (Kohler Riessman and Mattingly, 2005: 427) are some of the labels used to understand ethical issues researchers face in their research in the conduct of their research. As Paoletti et al. (2013) write, many ethical challenges are described as ‘emerging during research activities quite unexpectedly, abruptly confronting the researcher who is often alone when taking a decision in this matter’. Here, reflexivity plays a key role, since it involves continual critical self-evaluation of the researcher’s positionality and the ways this may impact on research processes and outcomes (Berger, 2015; Carpenter, 2019; Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Salzman, 2002). A continual critical self-evaluation demonstrates that ethics in research practice are relational in so far as they are never outside human (and non-human) relations (Murris, 2021).

Despite a plethora of research literature on suicide, surprisingly very little attention has been given to the ethical issues researchers are likely to face during their research on suicide (Andriessen et al., 2019a, 2019b; Hom et al., 2017). When suicide research does pay attention to ethics, the context tends to be quantitative rather than qualitative, and the focus on what is pragmatic and procedural, namely, the role of institutional human ethics review committees. Potential harm to participants, and researchers’ responsibilities to participants remain the most common areas of concern and debate (Andriessen et al., 2019a, 2019b; Deuter and Jaworski, 2017; Gibson et al., 2013; Lakeman and Fitzgerald, 2009a, 2009b; Moore et al., 2013). Core tenets of individual autonomy and privacy shape the ethical areas of priority, and as such, preserving confidentiality, maintaining participant anonymity and providing support are key responsibilities suicide researchers must always fulfil (Andriessen et al., 2019a; Biddle et al., 2013; Johnson, 2007; Lakeman and Fitzgerald, 2009a).

As important as the pragmatic and procedural focus on research ethics is, it does little to prepare suicide researchers for the ethical challenges they may encounter through their methodologies and methods of research. Unfortunately, apart from Boden et al. (2016) and Boden (2018), very few qualitative studies on suicide report on ethical issues in research practice. For these researchers, what is missing from purely institutional ethical discussion is attention to critical reflexivity, and ‘the ethical importance of feelings that emerge through research encounters’ (Boden et al., 2016: 1078). Influenced by Giddens’ (1991) rational and individualistic sociological approach, Boden et al. (2016) view reflexivity as a practice of critically reflecting on how the researcher constructs knowledge from the research process. This means being critically aware of anything that might influence interpretation (Boden et al., 2016). Such awareness requires the researcher to remain conscious of ethical dimensions of everyday research practice, maintain sensitivity to ‘ethically important moments’, and develop the ability to respond to ethical concerns if and when they arise (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004: 276). However, Boden et al. (2016) and Boden (2018) argue that reflexivity in research practice must also involve a critical awareness of one’s feelings and emotions. Self-awareness, empathy, honesty and courage are key to protecting participants and researchers, and to being aware of the degree to which participants can affect researchers (Boden et al., 2016). Thus, being aware of emotional labour in research on suicide is paramount to understanding ethics in practice (Boden, 2018).

The discussions and arguments above reveal that ethics in suicide research are relational. For Boden (2018) in particular, who draws heavily on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1964), the relational nature of ethics is not only emotional, but also embodied. This means a researcher is very likely to feel vulnerable by remaining open ‘more fully to being-with our participants and their stories, even when this is painful and challenging’ (Boden, 2018: 54, original emphasis). What is interesting about this understanding of ethics is that relationality is framed something to do with relationships, with emotions playing a key role interacting and relating to participants (Boden, 2018; Boden et al., 2016; Edwards and Hillyard, 2012; Figueroa, 2000; Jackson, 2021; Keenan, 2012; Simons and Usher, 2000; van Den Hoonaard, 2017). While this take on relationality is important and useful, it does not move beyond discussing the impact of emotions on rapport development with suicide survivors, and the emotional issues suicide researchers may face in their research encounters with participants.

Focusing on the relationship between qualitative methodology and research ethics in one example of suicide research, in this article I want to contribute to, and extend the focus on, ethics as relational by demonstrating relationality as a philosophical interdependence and interconnectedness that can bind researchers to their participants in relational and existential ways. In so doing, I want to examine the degree to which the alterity of the suicidal ‘Other’ can be constitutive of those of us who research suicide, and what this alterity can offer towards understanding the vulnerability of those who research in more expansive terms. Part description, part reflection and part argument, this article draws on my experiences of interviewing gender-and sexually diverse young people about their familiarity with suicide. These experiences are based on a qualitative pilot study I conducted on queer youth suicide, which used the unstructured interview technique to collect data. Drawing on the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, I will consider what it means to face the suicidal ‘Other’, and what this facing entails in terms of research ethics as relational. I will contend that facing reveals not only myself as more vulnerable than I anticipated, but also the suicidal ‘Other’ as agentic instead of only vulnerable and at-risk of suicide. Thus, understanding relationality as interconnection and interdependence is important so that we, as qualitative suicide researchers, may have a clearer sense of what binds us to the stories participants share with us, especially since some stories may affect us beyond our reflexive efforts to work through them.

One thing needs flagging at this point. Throughout the article, I will refer to research participants as the suicidal ‘Other’. Taking the cue from Butler’s (2005: x) reading of Levinas, I will use the notion of ‘Other’ to refer to human specificity and difference – alterity – rather than in terms of being framed as inferior. Because I too will draw upon Emmanuel Levinas’ work later in this article, the use of ‘Other’ will remain capitalised, since as Butler (2005: x) explains, for Levinas, ‘“the Other” not only refers to the human other but acts as a place-holder for the infinite ethical relation’. In light of the ‘Other’ being framed outside of an inherent vulnerability, I have chosen to use suicidal ‘Other’ to refer to participants who may otherwise be automatically assumed as vulnerable or ‘at-risk’. Those who survive suicide are often deemed to fall into these assumed categories because of their history with suicide, and because they are considered as belonging to a cohort at a high risk of experiencing several health and social problems (Haas et al., 2011; Kirchner et al., 2020; Suicide Prevention Australia, 2020). Such categorisations are problematic, because as Cover (2012: 70, original emphasis) argues, by being framed as at-risk, ‘queer youth become not only automatically vulnerable, but the vulnerability is figured as internal to their non-normative identity’. This crude framing represents queer youth as voiceless and without agency, or capacity to think and act on their own terms (Bryan and Mayock, 2017).

Therefore, in my use of suicidal ‘Other’, I will seek to challenge the logic of risk and the lack of agency it attributes to queer youth in the following ways. First, I will not deny that gender-and sexually diverse young people experience adversity and are othered as a result, nor will I assume that adversity is experienced in the same way by every person. Consequently, like Cover (2012), I will remain critical of, and resist the assumption that queer young people are vulnerable precisely because they are queer, or that they are all uniformly vulnerable. As a result, such positioning is considerably different from assuming that non-normative sexualities or genders somehow cause suicide, and instead looks to understand how heteronormative social and cultural contexts provide the conditions through which queer youth form their identities (Cover, 2012; McDermott and Roen, 2016).

Sexuality, identity and queer young people’s experiences with suicide: A qualitative pilot study

Between 2012 and 2017, I – an Eastern-European white, migrant, bisexual woman scholar – conducted a pilot study based on an exploratory and descriptive qualitative approach to investigate the relationship between sexuality and identity in queer young people’s experiences of suicide. I drew on this methodology to collect in-depth and situated accounts of queer young people’s experiences with suicide, based on their own perspectives (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). I deployed the unstructured interview technique to collect the data, because it enables the participants to have more control over the interview process, including the direction the discussion takes (Corbin and Morse, 2003; Fontana and Prokos, 2007). I also deployed the unstructured interviewing method because of its potential to allow participants to challenge the at-risk normative discourse surrounding them. Alongside aiming to explore the relationship between sexuality and identity, the second aim was to test the suitability of the unstructured interview technique, since qualitative studies on queer youth suicide at the time mostly used quantitative methods such as surveys and questionnaires. ¹ The study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at the University of South Australia.

I recruited participants through university notice boards, university campus toilets and a local Rainbow Club. I used purposive sampling to recruit participants based on them having ‘particular characteristics which enable. . .detailed exploration and understandings of issues central to the project’ (Ritchie et al., 2003: 78). Purposive sampling meant that participants had to be aged 18–25 years, self-identified under the broad umbrella of LGBTIQ+, lived in Adelaide, came from various cultural backgrounds, contemplated or attempted suicide in the past, but not during the last 12–18 months and were not under regular psychiatric care. The last two sample characteristics were concerned with minimising potential risk of suicide following an interview. In the end, I interviewed 10 young people who self-identified as queer in various ways. The participants specified their own labels under the queer umbrella as follows: two identified as cisgender gay men; four as lesbian women; one as a cisgender woman attracted to other cisgender women; one as a trans man; one as a non-binary bisexual; and one as a bisexual woman.

The interviews were held at the university campus, at a location determined as private and safe. From the moment we sat down, I tried to be open and honest with the participants, based on my desire to acknowledge their courage to share their stories with me. Once the consent form was signed and freedom to withdraw at any time communicated, each interview began with me explaining the reasons for the study, and why I personally identified with and cared about the topic. I also communicated that I hoped the unstructured interview technique would maximise their sense of control over the interview. I did say that I had questions to guide the conversation, but this was only in case they wanted me to start the interview. I reassured each participant that they had complete control of where our conversation would take us. As requested by the University’s HREC, the ‘just-in-case’ interview schedule was:

I constructed these questions mindful of victim tropes popular in both homophobic and anti-homophobic representations of gender-and sexually diverse young people (Cover, 2012; Marshall, 2010; Rasmussen, 2006; Rofes, 2004; Savin-Williams, 2005). I was critical of such representations because they portray queer subjects as wounded, with queerness linked to inherent damage and injury (Harwood, 2004: 467), and a need for salvation (Bryan and Mayock, 2014; Ciszek, 2014; Marshall, 2010). At the same time, I did not want to reinforce a neoliberal version of a subject who is framed as completely free to be and do what they want (Cover, 2012, 2013; McDermott and Roen, 2016). In a nutshell, my purpose behind the requested interview schedule was to resist the binary thinking of either/or embedded in the discursive construction of woundedness versus neoliberal agency.

Even when I did not abide by the questions, the first half of each interview focussed on how the young people discovered their identities and they came to experience suicide. The second half focussed on survival and their lives at that particular time. Interviews lasted between 40 minutes and 2.5 hours. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim to ensure the accuracy of data interpretation (Liamputtong, 2009; Patton, 2002). After each interview, I would digitally record my own thoughts, feelings and responses to what I had heard. This reflexive journaling, as Etherington (2004), Ortlipp (2008) and Smith (1999) document, helped me to identify what stood out about each interview and to record my feelings as well as emerging ideas. As advised by the ethics committee, I would liaise with a colleague familiar with qualitative research, but I often did not know how to express myself fully in the interactions. I often felt as if I could not find the ‘right’ words to articulate my thoughts and feelings. Reflexive journaling proved more useful, because it gave me the space to write through the struggle of expression to arrive at a point of feeling that I had articulated my afterthoughts.

Following a thematic method of analysis, defined as ‘identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 79), I initially read and re-read interview transcripts for a broad sense of what the interview was like. I worked on each interview transcript at least twice, with time apart between readings to maximise interpretive rigour. This process enabled me to reflexively identify categories and themes that recurred in the data (Gibbs, 2012). I used thematic analysis because, as Braun and Clarke (2006, 2021) state, it minimally organises the data and therefore retains its rich detail. This was important in making sure the analysis preserved the voices of young people as much as possible, knowing their voices were now bound to my interpretive lenses.

Although a discussion of findings is not part of the aims of this article, it is worth describing some aspects to offer a snapshot. Most of the young people I interviewed experienced serious forms of bullying and homophobia in high school, lack of support from teachers and counsellors, rejection by peers and family, and when not completely rejected, family members did not know how to respond to their coming out, or their ways of being queer. Two participants experienced physical, emotional and psychological abuse, one of which moved out of home in their late teenage years because of the physical abuse. Some experienced homophobia in the workplace. Others had a terrible time with the mental health system because they were not taken seriously. Others found it hard to be on anti-depressants because they wanted to know when they would get better, which seemed unpredictable. Even when some participants were accepted, their peers expected them to be queer in stereotypical ways. Some found this frustrating because they were still working out their sense of what it meant to be themselves. And of course, the young people talked about their bodies – how they understood their embodiment and what physically happened to their bodies when they turned to suicide. Trust in authority figures and parents made things better, as did the refusal to let go, a strong sense of justice and a deep desire to prove themselves academically. Some fell in love and formed strong bonds and others developed a strong sense of kinship with accepting family members and friends. Others discovered the joys of regular queer sex. These reasons offered the participants a sense of having a future in which things could change and be rich, varied and genuine rather than just ‘better’. ²

The process of gaining ethical clearance

In Australia, research across universities, government departments and other funding organisations is guided by The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007 (Updated 2018), which consists of guidelines produced in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council Act 1992 (NHMRC, 2018). The statement identifies four core values: (a) respect for human beings (which includes protecting anonymity), (b) research merit and integrity, (c) justice (benefits and burdens of research and procedural justice) and (d) beneficence (potential harm and benefits of research to participants and wider community). The National Statement further specifies that the responsibility for the ethical design and conduct of human research is exercised at various levels, including researchers, ethical committees, funding organisations and government departments (NHMRC, 2018). Once the funding for the pilot study was approved, I submitted the application for ethics clearance. I expected to undergo a full review due to the topic of the study.

The decision I received for my ethical clearance application was ‘approved subject to’. In a nutshell, the project’s risk management/minimisation strategies were insufficient. I had to ensure a more immediate access to specialist professional counselling and care for participants in the event they displayed suicidal or self-harming tendencies. I had to improve strategies of protecting my own safety, and provide clearer risk management strategies if participants displayed suicidal tendencies or other risky behaviours or disclosed information which indicated that they were ‘at-risk’ of suicide during the interviews. I was invited to attend a meeting with the committee to discuss issues related to safety aspects of the study. This invitation was part of the final approval process.

I addressed the concerns as follows. I added two extra sample characteristics: I would only interview participants who had not experienced suicidal ideation or attempts for at least 12–18 months and were not seeing a psychiatrist regularly. I reviewed my risk management/minimisation strategies by ensuring all interviews would take place on campus and in person only. ³ I consulted with the on-campus security team to gain their approval of the protocol I would follow with each interview, namely, to check in before and after each interview. I also consulted with the security team to learn about campus emergency procedures and passive use of space during interviews to ensure my own safety. I consulted with the on-campus psychology clinic to establish what services could be used in case of an emergency. As indicated earlier, I provided a ‘just-in-case’ interview schedule. I agreed not to employ professional transcription services, and instead enlisted the services of a research assistant who would sign a confidentiality agreement and transcribe all interviews on campus in my office. While the process of gaining ethical clearance was immensely useful, it did not ethically prepare me as a researcher for what was to come. The process assumed that ethics ontologically exist prior to any relations that take shape in research practices, and that subject and object are separate in research (Murris, 2021). Furthermore, the process re-emphasised the need for me to walk a fine ethical line between ensuring the well-being of my participants while resisting the power of at-risk discursive framing at the same time.

Facing the suicidal Other

I knew from the start that, as Boden (2018: 59) writes in relation to her experiences of interviewing survivors of suicide attempts, opening myself up ‘to the other means being willing to acknowledge and sit with their felt experiences’. Indeed, the interviews were challenging to face, because the participants did most of the talking in some of the interviews, and this talking contained viscerally distressing experiences. Furthermore, I encountered courage in practice. I find it difficult to put this into words other than to say that something kept unfolding throughout each interview, as each participant revealed elements of themselves. I encountered perseverance in the face of adversity. I encountered a desire to exist not because of someone’s sense of queerness, but despite of it. ⁴ Each and every time this happened, I was reminded that my experience in qualitative interviewing and the code of research ethics got me to the interview stage, and the rest was uncertain, dependent on the encounters between myself and the young people. Each time this happened, I was reminded that vulnerability can occlude the possibility of queer youth resisting and/or re-working ‘the vulnerability script’ (Bryan and Mayock, 2014: 91). If we consider this in the context of Butler’s (1990, 1993) work on performativity, then vulnerability is a normative effect rather than an identity descriptor researchers may be compelled to recognise because of the discourse on vulnerability in research on queer youth suicide.

Let me offer an example of what I have described above. I interviewed Beckett ⁵ in 2014, which took 2.5 hours, and resulted in a 60-page transcript. I literally asked Beckett only one question at the beginning of the interview, namely, ‘tell me about yourself’, after which she did most of the talking. Beckett self-identified as a ‘a cisgendered female woman, who’s attracted to other cisgendered female women’. Beckett also referred to her identity as ‘a queer woman’ throughout the interview, because ‘the term lesbian doesn’t actually fit’. Starting from when she was a child, Beckett struggled to feel as if she belonged in the rural Australian town she grew up in. This was despite being an intelligent, active, creative, tactile child who loved making things, and was loved by her family. Beckett ‘didn’t have dollies and was very much a tomboy’. Unfortunately, Beckett was bullied at school, which made her wet her bed at night until she was 12 years old. Later on, she was perceived as very smart, and took accelerated classes in high school for subjects such as English. Nevertheless, by Year 12 she ‘was really well and truly an outcast’.

Despite an apparent gender fluidity, as a teenager Beckett was certain that: ‘I was straight, and that I was gonna die when I was 21’. At the age of 12, Beckett decided that she ‘needed to experiment with myself and find out what’s wrong with me’. While self-destruction started much earlier, it was then she started to cut herself, ‘but not deeply. . .I tried to figure out how to make myself fit. It was more of a. . .you know. . .that repressed anger and frustration went from being inwards to being outwards’. It was a period during which she felt attracted to other girls, but didn’t think of it as queer. At the beginning of high school, Beckett was humiliated. She recalls a particular incident as follows:

One of the girls turned around and she said, Beckett, are you gay. . .are you a lesbian, are you a dyke? And I’m like, what do you mean? Well, you got short hair and you really like sport, and you keep staring at me when I get changed. And I’m like, I’m not staring at you, like honestly not. I’m literally, what the fuck? And it really upset me, and she’s like I think you’re gay like you’re a total dyke, like you know really – and it’s in front of my entire class. And. . . every time after then when I’d get changed for sport, I would turn my back and I’d face a corner, [be]cause I was like I’m not gonna give you another opportunity to do this to me.

The above excerpt is one example of many which demonstrates the sort of challenges Beckett faced throughout her high school years. These may frame her as being ‘at-risk’ and ‘vulnerable’. Despite this, I invite the reader to read Beckett as responding rather than reacting to the heteronormative world, trying to resist the homophobic effects of bullying. Perhaps then, as Butler (2016) claims, vulnerability and resistance are not binary opposites, but rather vulnerability becomes one condition for making resistance possible. By promising she was ‘not gonna give you another opportunity to do this to me’, Beckett resisted the wounding manner of the way she was performatively addressed, and in so doing, exercised agency in the context of her queer vulnerability at that time of her life.

Something changed in the interview, roughly around the two-hour mark. Beckett was in the middle of describing how her parents came to visit her in Adelaide for her 21st birthday. Together with one of her friends, they all went to a beach to celebrate. She describes this occasion as follows:

I looked at my parents and pulled out a cigarette and lit it up, first time I lit up a cigarette in front of my parents. . .and they looked at me and smiled. And I went, remember this time when I was doing this in the house. . .like [the] drug addiction things, they’re like, yeah you were tripping, and I said, you knew, they said, yeah we knew that you tried to kill yourself multiple times. I said do you remember that time I told you. . .that I had a really rough night about six months ago. . .. I’d taken a lot of drugs, and. . .went and stood on the tram tracks to Glenelg. . .and a friend followed me and pulled me off as I was watching the tram come. . .. I said [to the parents] I don’t want to be angry anymore. . .. I don’t want to be drug addicted and confused. . .I wanna know what I am, I wanna know what I like and what I love, and I want to be proud of it. I don’t want to be scared and I don’t want to be terrified of love, and I don’t want to. . .feel. . .like. . .there’s something wrong with me. . .. And my mum and dad said, okay what do you want us to do? I said. . .tell me honestly. . .if there was ever a point, were you not proud that I was your daughter, and they said no. I said, and tell me, was there any point that you thought that what I was doing [was] immoral or fucked up or something that I. . .um. . .something that was wrong of me to do, and they said no. . .on that beach for my 21^st birthday, I died. . .. I let go of it, I didn’t cry. I didn’t shake, I just felt lighter.

Lengthy as it is, the above excerpt demonstrates the way Beckett symbolically let go of what she experienced earlier in life. This is an agentic moment in the interview, for it is here that Beckett names what she wants and who she wants to be in front of those who love her. Thus, as Beckett continued to explain,

My discovery as a young gay woman, young gay cisgender woman, saved my life from a whole bunch of confusion. . .. But this saved me because it gave me. . .something I could use. It’s not a box, it’s not a title, it’s not gay people are us, it’s you are you.

This being ‘you’ was ‘all about desire’, as Beckett later explained. In this sense, desire was a condition of possibility through which Beckett could find a sense of liveability outside conditions of existence that would likely frame her as little more than vulnerable and wounded.

But there is something else to the excerpt above. I cannot pin down with precision the moment it happened, but suddenly I saw Beckett while she was recounting her experience of going down to the beach with her parents and friend. This is an odd experience to describe, given that I sat opposite, and I was intently listening to what Beckett was saying from the beginning of the interview. I was completely zoned in and felt my perception shift. It was as if time slowed down, and Beckett’s being stood out against the background of the room we were in. Her eyes were alive, and it was as if I could see every pore of her skin on her face. I saw and felt the intensity of her being beyond aesthetic terms. By saying this, I am not implying that I apprehended Beckett’s queer intelligibility through her capacity to survive. Nor am I implying that Beckett, as a queer subject, had to suffer to become visible, and by extension, intelligible. Rather, I am suggesting that in feeling her aliveness, I understood even more Beckett as agentic, as someone who resisted, survived and lived alongside being vulnerable. In this sense, the unstructured interview method provided me with the opportunity to stay tuned into Beckett’s account and recognise her agency outside the stereotypes of compulsory vulnerability (Cover, 2012, 2013).

A few days later, I digitally recorded two separate entries in my reflective diary. These are as follows:

It’s Saturday, day after. . .my interview with Beckett. I had awful dreams last night, I didn’t record an entry yesterday. . .because I was speechless. . .. Beckett was amazing. . .over two hours, with most of her talking. . .. Um. . . an incredible encounter, in terms of me listening to the narrative. . .I just wonder whether it’s connected to learning how to recognise better, so it’s not just listening, but it’s also about recognition. I think the interview space gave her. . .lots of freedom and agency to narrate her story. . .. She tried to hang herself when she was seven. . .I didn’t know what to say to this, other than just to keep company with it.

What strikes me about Beckett is that even though she had so much self-destruction in her life, drugs, lots of cutting. . .she had/has this amazing tenacity to live. . .has never given up on that. . .that’s not to say she was seeking attention by manipulating people’s attention. I think it was about working through what she was feeling, and the cuts and the body stuff was a language. . .it’s really interesting how she said she died at the age of 21, which. . .she describes as a symbolical way of letting go, letting go of all the crap that she’s lived with.

The journal entries speak to being overwhelmed and exhausted mentally and emotionally. As Boden (2018: 51) notes, understanding what is difficult is not difficult because of what is said in the interview, but ‘because the visceral power of understanding can feel too much’. In feeling like it was all too much, I became acutely aware of the importance of recognition, which became ethical as it helped me resist reading a participant ‘marked’ by membership of a community deemed as vulnerable and at risk. Thus, recognition was not a merely cognitive event but, rather, as Frosh and Baraitser (2003: 79) explain, it is about ‘something actively reaching out that makes what it finds, yet also lets the other be. . .what is found in the other is also cherished specifically for its capacity to be different, for its otherness’. As a result, it was clear to me that knowledge of suicide is mutually co-constituted and interconnected, with both researcher and the researched implicated, albeit in possibly different ways.

Conclusion

As a result of the relationship between the qualitative research design and research ethics in practice in my pilot study, I recognised that my agency as a researcher is always co-constituted through the alterity of the suicidal Other in ways I did not foresee. I also recognised that those who are framed as vulnerable are not without agency, nor are they without a capacity to speak and act even when they are struggling, and even when they may not respond in the coherent ways the world expects them to. Participants such as Beckett are agentic not simply because they came to the interview and led the conversation as they saw fit. Rather, they are agentic because of how researchers comprehend them as ‘deeply connected to our common humanity’, which means going beyond framing them as a vulnerable group of people (Boden, 2018: 56). I did not listen to stories of heartache, violence or helplessness. I also encountered what came across as queer courage, or a performative act of persistence against the heteronormative fabric of society without set boundaries of what it means to be queer while questioning the social conditions and stereotypes that categorise them so rigidly.

Beckett’s account forced me to recognise persistence instead of risk. Therefore, it is crucial for us to push ourselves to understand our participants’ suicidal journeys contextually rather than atomising them ‘into risk factors and behaviours’ (Boden, 2018: 56). It is crucial to keep company to a sense of discomfort in so far as it means admitting that there is a certain degree of ethical unknowability in our research practices. It is also crucial to research suicide by using methodologies and methods that go against the trend of treating gender-and sexually diverse young people as a faceless statistic, which occludes the possibility of understanding vulnerability and resistance together. This, I think, is crucial, as it allows us to reject either/or binary thinking and embrace a both/and approach to understand more generously what it means to live as young and queer despite of suicide.