Discourses of Mens Suicide Notes: A Qualitative Analysis

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Deaths by suicide are high: every 40 seconds, someone in the world chooses to end their life. Despite acknowledgement that suicide notes are social texts, there has been no book which analyzes suicide notes as discursive texts and no attempt at a qualitative discourse analysis of them. Discourses of Mens Suicide Notes redresses this gap in the literature. Focussing on men and masculinity and anchored in qualitative discourse analysis, Dariusz Galasinski responds to the need for a more thorough understanding of suicidal behaviour. Culturally, men have been posited to be 'masters of the universe' and yet some choose to end their lives. This book takes a qualitative approach to data gathered from the Polish Corpus of Suicide Notes, a unique repository of over 600 suicide notes, to explore discourse from and about men at the most traumatic juncture of their lives. Discussing how men construct suicide notes and the ways in which they position their relationships and identities within them, Discourses of Mens Suicide Notes seeks to understand what these notes mean and what significance and power they are invested with.

Reviews

[An] important publication that lays the foundation for the future study of suicide notes. It clearly delineates linguistic and discursive features of the corpus that are characteristic of the genre. More importantly, as this work presents a comprehensive cataloguing of suicide note features, it is able to challenge long-held assumptions on the nature and purpose of the suicide note. * LINGUIST List *
The strength of this book is its interdisciplinarity: it is useful to a wide range of researchers, and Galasinskis arguments for adopting discourse analysis in clinical research is convincing, well-argued and maintained through the book ... An important publication that enriches our understanding of the key themes of suicide notes and uses these observations to challenge previous research ... A valuable book for anyone interested in suicide research and health communication studies more generally. * CADAAD Journal *

Author Bio

Dariusz Galasinski is Professor of Discourse and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS) in Warsaw, Poland.