Who has the Right to Mandate Living?

Course Description

This conversation is about troubling the western mandate that privileges life’s sanctity and treats death as failure. It’s about creating space for what remains unspeakable in our profession. It’s about questioning taken for granted efforts to eradicate suicidality, and moving towards “new ways to imagine it and to live, and sometimes die, with it.” (Baril, 2023) It’s about grappling with the right to refuse the injunction to live.

Instructor Information

Educational Goals

1. Develop an understanding of Alexander Baril’s Anti-Oppressive framework for rethinking suicide & suicidality.
2. Develop an awareness of how the preventionist script in suicide care privileges life over death and perpetuates suicidism.
3. Develop the capacity to question the injunction to live and contemplate what it means to embrace a “suicide-affirmative” approach through accompaniment.

Measurable Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to define Suicidism as a system of oppression targeting suicidal people.
2. Participants will be able to distinguish between Critical Suicidology and a “Suicide-Affirmative” approach.
3. Participants will be able to identify how the “sanctity of life” discourse, privileged in western suicide intervention approaches, prevents real engagement with realities such as “terminal despair”.

Outline with Main Points for Each Topic (including times)

1. 9:45–10:15 AM · Topic A: The Prevention Trap — 30 minutes

   • Suicidism
   • Compulsory Aliveness

2. 10:15–10:45 AM · Topic B: Baril’s Anti-Oppressive Approach to Suicide — 30 minutes

   • Confronting the Injunction to Live
   • A Suicide-Affirmative Stance

3. 10:45–11:15 AM · Topic C: Accompaniment — 30 minutes

   • Standing witness to Terminal Despair
   • Palliative care for the soul

Total instructional time: 30 + 30 + 30 = 90 minutes / 60 = 1.5 CE hours

Signing in and out

• Sign in at the door between 9:30 AM and 9:45 AM.
• Sign out and complete this session’s evaluation at the door when it ends at 11:15 AM.
• Sign-in, sign-out and the evaluation are not part of the 1.5 CE hours.

References

• Baril, A. (2022). Theorizing the intersections of ableism, sanism, ageism and suicidism in suicide and physician-assisted death debates. In J. M. Reynolds & C. Wieseler (Eds.), The disability bioethics reader (pp. 221–231). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003289487-28
• Baril, A. (2023). Undoing suicidism: A trans, queer, crip approach to rethinking (assisted) suicide. Temple University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5104041
• Baril, A. (2024). Learning to “live with” death: Developing a suicide-affirmative approach as an ethics of “living with” suicidal people. In D. Hétu, L. García Zarranz, A. Fayant, & M. Carrière (Eds.), Living and learning with feminist ethics, literature, and art (pp. 63–81). University of Alberta Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781772127805-007
• White, J., Marsh, I., Kral, M. J., & Morris, J. (Eds.). (2016). Critical suicidology: Transforming suicide research and prevention for the 21st century. UBC Press. https://doi.org/10.59962/9780774830317