A Brief Comment on “Postvention”
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(La suicida, 1952, Acuarela / cartón. 42 x 29 cm. EBV017. Coleção Blaisten)
In the recent vocabulary of mental health, “postvention” emerged as a therapeutic neologism for the care of those left behind, the people bereaved by suicide. It is a technical term, to be sure, but it holds within it an ethical abyss, a philosophical trauma and an unanswered question. What can we do... what should we do... after someone's voluntary death? If prevention aims to avert the fall, postvention deals with the ground. With the fragments. With the room still tidy, the plate still on the table, the gesture still suspended in memory. It is above all the belated naming of an absence, and thus an attempt to bring back into discourse something that no language can contain: a life that chose to end.
But here the problems begin. In many postvention programmes, what we find is the “management” of grief in place of listening. Biomedical logic extends to bereavement: the grieving person's suffering becomes a symptom, their longing a pathology, their search for meaning a delusion. There is an effort to fill the emptiness instead of bearing it. The enigma is closed off with diagnoses instead of being received as such. Pain is treated as something to be “resolved,” when perhaps it asks for only one thing: respect... and silence.
This tendency becomes still more troubling when we recall that, in the West after the end of late antiquity, voluntary death came to be surrounded by moral and legal prohibitions. From Augustine, who defined it as self-homicide (and it would later be christened suicidium, perhaps in tribute to the bishop), the Christian tradition condemned both the act and those who understood it with compassion. Modernity inherited and secularized that condemnation. Where it was once said that the person who died by suicide sinned against God, now it is said that they suffered from a mental disorder. In both cases the possibility of meaning is denied.
Yet postvention ought above all to offer a chance to restore some space for meaning to the gesture that disrupts the world of the living. How can we conceive of a meaning that neither moralizes nor pathologizes? How can we listen to those who remain without making them defendants, accomplices or patients? Since Foucault we know that the discourse of care can also be a form of control. “Care for the bereaved,” when codified in protocols, risks erasing the most radical aspect of their experience: the encounter with another's freedom. And in our culture no pain is harder to bear than the pain that comes from another person's choice to die. In this sense, postvention calls for empathy and for an ethics of alterity taken to its limit. Philosophy can contribute to this task, I think, by bearing the vertigo of suicide's mystery in place of seeking to explain it. For Plato, death is the separation of soul and body. It must never be hastened voluntarily, though we can practise for it through the exercise of thought. For Augustine, voluntary death is a rupture of the divine order. For Nietzsche, it can be the culmination of a tragic affirmation of life. Three perspectives, three ethics, three ways of listening to the end. We could offer a hundred other perspectives, a hundred other ways to understand death. And perhaps this is the most important point: there is always room for variation. This is why I think a history of suicide is possible.
But the most painful and most urgent question is this: what should we say to those left behind? Perhaps nothing. Or almost nothing. The pain of losing someone to this kind of death (suicide is a kind of death, not a cause!) asks for presence rather than explanation. What postvention needs to recover is the ancient wisdom of mourning more than the psychologist's manual of conduct. Weep with. Be silent with. Keep someone company up to the point where words can no longer reach... and still stay close. Suicide is a rupture in time, but also in discourse. It leaves sentences unfinished, promises suspended and burdens of guilt that no one knows whether to carry. Philosophy can help, yes, if it accepts that it does not know. The philosopher, I insist with Plato, knows that they do not know. Perhaps this is true postvention: bearing what remains unfinished.
Finally, some silences are a form of resistance, distinct from illness. Perhaps grief after suicide needs only to be recognized as legitimate, rather than cured. And perhaps those left behind need simply to be heard, rather than medicalized (that is, subjected to the psychiatric modus operandi)... even when they have nothing to say. There may be wisdom, too, in listening to another person's silence.
Prof. (and student) Alexandre H. Reis
Emotional support People in need of help can turn to the Centro de Valorização da Vida (CVV), a group of volunteers who provide free emotional support. Find out more.