Critical suicidology is an emerging area of scholarship and advocacy that brings together expertise from diverse perspectives to re-examine all that we have believed to be “true” about suicide prevention. Critical suicidologists question the highly medicalized framework of understanding a suicidal person and see suicide in context by understanding how other frameworks — like social justice — expand our imagination on what is possible in prevention, intervention and postvention.

In this conversation with Jess Stohlmann-Rainey, we talk about the ways traditional efforts in suicide prevention have failed us including:

• Forced treatment

• Fear-based approaches of restraint and isolation

• Trying to predict suicide risk

And instead explore alternative, creative and upstream approaches to suicide prevention such as transformative justice work, mutual aid peer support, and accountability in making reparations for histories of harm done to communities.