This panel will focus on the implications of the significant rise in suicides and suicidality in recent years, including differences among groups of identification and belonging (age, gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, immigration status, etc.). These papers speak on topics including working clinically or pastorally with survivors of attempted suicide or survivors of those who have died by suicide, psychological and religious issues of stigmatization and shame, and the effects on family, friends, and communities.
As rates of suicide among Black Americans increase, there is an opportunity for Black churches to tailor their pastoral care efforts to be more inclusive of mental health concerns. This study aims to develop recommendations for enhancing pastoral care specifically with Black women who experience suicidality. In so doing, it suggests that formulating witnessing as a process of pastoral care could provide a robust theological foundation on which to ground such ministerial work. Through ethnographic methods and digital storytelling, this project provides a firsthand encounter with Black women suicide attempt survivors who articulate their own mental and spiritual health needs, desires, and priorities. This presentation will situate the topic of Black women’s mental health and suicide within the discipline of practical theology, describe the research methods, and offer preliminary findings and emerging analysis alongside a case study of one digital story.
In this paper I will share my research on the trauma of Black invisibility, how a seemingly the lack of compassion for Black suffering leads to many either bypassing Black pain by imposing embedded theologies that refusing to see it all together believing that black strength and resilience is a protector factor against Black suicide. I argue for a womanist informed practical theology of embodied empathy and compassion integrated with internal family systems to create a culture of seeing in black churches and communities.
Even today, U.S. Christian approaches to suicide still treat it as taboo and often fail to provide healing support. Specifically, U.S. Christian communities remain complacent in their lack of suicide literacy, moralizing judgment against suicide people, and/or medicalizing gaze on suicidal people simply as “sick.” These responses promote an individualistic framework central to U.S. culture that sharply separates suicidal people from the rest of the human community, thereby stigmatizing them. To help redress this, I engage sociological, psychological, and first-person work on suicidality in a social justice framework that centers the needs of suicidal people. Ultimately, U.S. Christians must become lovingly familiar with people’s lived experiences of suicidality and apply an intersectional framework that examines how oppressive forces such as white supremacist heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism spike suicidality. To the extent that suicide is a socially predictable problem, it is, through collective action, also a tractable one.