Where Did AAS Go Wrong
David Lester
Back in the 1970s, the American
Association of Suicidology (AAS) was a small organization. Founded by Ed
Shneidman and others, AAS was an organization for researchers into suicidal
behavior and those working at suicide prevention centers (mainly telephone
crisis counselors and administrators) to meet and discuss new ideas. It was
administered by Julie Perlman who was not a suicidologist, and she ran the
organization well.
The conferences were fun and
exciting. Thomas Szasz was invited to argue against preventing suicide and was
engaged in heated debate. Derek Humphry, author of Final Exit, was invited.
Then a decision was made to increase
the membership of AAS. The more members, it was thought, the more income and
the greater the influence. The first group to be invited consisted of
survivors, that is, those who had lost a loved-one to suicide. On the whole,
the survivors were not interest in research or improving our ability to
understand and prevent suicide. Participating in AAS was part of the grieving
process for them, a chance to share powerful emotions with others. For some, it
became almost a new career path.
As I see it, the goals of AAS should
be to improve our understanding of suicide and to improve the ways we can
prevent suicide. Survivors were not involved in this. There were exceptions, of
course. For example, I worked with Donna Barnes and Denise Pazur, both of whom
lost sons to suicide, and we published several scholarly articles together.
These were exceptions.[1]
The next decision was to encourage
attempted suicides to join AAS. Again, these individuals typically have no
interest in research, but rather in finding others with whom to share their
experiences and to obtain therapeutic benefit. This is manifest in that most
attempted suicides and survivors do not want AAS’s scholarly journal (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior)
and were offered a reduced membership fee.
The results over the years has been
to marginalize the researchers. When I used to attend, colleagues joked that
research sessions were getting scheduled earlier and earlier so as to get them
out of the way, andnd the President of AAS has less often been a leading
researcher.
A look at the listserve maintained
by AAS for members and others who are interested illustrates the problem.
Occasionally, a research issue is discussed, and published papers suggested on
particular issues. Counselors request possible referrals to experts for
counselling suicidal individuals in their home towns. But other issues flood
the listserve too.
A mention of an article on rising
suicide in white males (who also constitute the major proportion of suicides in
the USA) prompted posts about how white males dominate the political and
business arenas. These posts did nothing to further our understanding of
suicide but rather fed into a social-political agenda of those posting,
appropriate in some arenas, but not at AAS. One post claimed that minorities by
ethnicity and gender felt marginalized by AAS. I doubt that any researcher or crisis counsellor feels marginalized by AAS because of ethnicity,
gender or any other attribute. The most recent president of AAS was criticized
for using a war analogy in his presidential address (a war on suicide), which was deemed politically incorrect, and he subsequently
resigned.
AAS has thus become less effective
in its goals of understanding suicide than in the past, although researchers
still continue to attend.
There is, of course, an alternative,
the International Academy of Suicide Research which was founded by myself and
Rene Diekstra, initially under the auspices of IASP, with an initial conference
sponsored by Diego de Leo in Padua, Italy. However, some complain these days
that those researchers favouring a physiological approach (focusing on the
central nervous system) dominate IASR.
What might be useful would be
conferences designed to address a specific issue with invitations sent only to
those interested in the issue. For example, back in the 1970s, I attended a
conference in Philadelphia, closed to others who were not invited, on the topic
of predicting suicide. About 20 of us sat in a room, gave talks and discussed
relevant issues about prediction. The talks were published as The Prediction of Suicide in 1974 edited
by Aaron Beck, Harvey Resnick and Daniel Lettieri. The same might be achieved
by edited books on particular issues. Presently, I am editing a book on Understanding Suicidal Ideation with
eight invited contributors which might serve such a purpose. Indeed, I hope in
my concluding chapter to suggest avenues where research into suicidal ideation might
go in the future
No comments:
Post a Comment