Interruptions in Identity

Interruptions in Identity: Engaging with Suicidality among the Indian Youth explores the shift in the author's perspective from an understanding of 'suicide' to an exploration of suicidality. The shift came organically from her experience of working in a university clinic and interacting with individuals who had communicated to her the presence of 'suicidal thoughts' during their sessions. The work is also an examination of how studying a tendency towards committing suicide is necessarily an attempt to understand the complex interplay of the personal and the social which often leads to that tendency described as suicidality. The work turns a psychosocial lens and further elaborates on how suicidality expresses itself in the space between the subject and the therapist within the safe space of a clinic. In taking us through these narratives, the author builds a case that it is important to reflect not just on the nature of individual suffering but also its interaction with the prevalent and relevant socio-political forces.