Reframing Queer Youth Suicide and Self-Harm

Abstract

This book addresses the fundamental question of why young people whose sexualities and genders are marginalised may become distressed and sometimes harm themselves. Youth who are minoritised in relation to sexuality or gender identity can face a range of embodied, emotional, discursive and material challenges. These challenges are sometimes evoked in explanations for suicide and self-harm among queer(ed) young people. Previous studies in this field have often asked, how many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth self-harm? Many have asked, what are the risk factors for LGBT youth suicide and self-harm? We take the inquiry deeper, focusing on a wide range of queer(ed) youth, and addressing questions about norms, emotions and embodiment. We are specifically interested in both the material and the discursive conditions through which it comes to make sense to some queer(ed) youth to harm their bodies. We are concerned with the 'incredible weight of cultural obligation that makes specific claims on the subjectivities of young people-to act in accordance with certain norms, to make a "success" of one's life and avoid "failure" at all costs' (Fullagar, 2003: 292). The long-standing psychopathologisation of 'deviant' sexualities and genders, where a person is labelled as mentally ill by virtue of their sexual and/or gender non-conformity, serves to remind us of the role psychiatric diagnoses have in defining social 'deviance' and social norms (Rogers and Piligrim, 2010). Despite the removal of homosexuality from psychiatric classification in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, there remains a dangerous association between certain gender and sexual characteristics and pathology (Davy, 2011). Queer(ed) people continue to encounter this pathology model in mental health services (Welch 1 E. McDermott et al., Queer Youth, Suicide and Self-Harm