Suicide and the Coloniality of the Senses, Time, and Being: The Aesthetics of Death Desires

Abstract

We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities.

1. Shifting the Ancestry of Suicide Knowledge: Restitution

The phone rings. It is 3:00 am. One more hour until the end of my (Anthony) 8 hour-long shift. The anticipated call intrudes into the quiet of my bedroom breaking my concentration on a school project. My heart skips a beat. I quickly sit up in my chair, anxiously. The body knows. As I get ready to pick up the phone, I glance inadvertently at the pictures on the wall of my friends, behind the small desk lamp and monitor. They are a constant reminder of the connections I have made in life and the humanity still left within me.

Anthony: Suicide and Crisis Line. This is Anthony speaking, how may I help you tonight?

I am hoping this is the last call of the night. I am feeling tired from five years of these late-night shifts. However, the reminder of the connections I have made with friends make me want to connect with whomever is on the other side of the line. I prepare myself to help whoever might be the caller. I have a variety of open screens in my computer, including text chats with co-workers, hotline policies, emergency contacts, and resources for help.

In the United States (U.S.), where we (marcela and Anthony) live and work, both folxs trained as suicide hotline workers as well as family therapists are regular consumers of the epistemic market of evidence-based suicide and prevention. This is, the Westernized, patriarchal marketplace or political (capitalist) economy of knowledge (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012) where we can access, one click away, the most competitive federal, state, or private-funded suicide policies; assessment protocols for intervention and prevention; and overall resources for help, in standard English. Within this capitalist market, prevention is overwhelmingly promoted as the single alternative response to suicide. Surely, the marketplace of knowledge is not only active in the U.S. It is a global marketplace, driven by capitalism, but it is the place from where we are writing about experiences with suicide, specifically in Southern California, home to the Chumash, Alliklik, Kitanemuk, Serrano, Gabrielino Luiseno Cahuilla, and the Kumeyaay communities.

Our search for knowledges about suicide has been influenced by various experiences and perspectives. Eurocentrically trained (marcela) and in training (Anthony) as family therapists, we began conceiving suicide from the contextual and relational philosophical foundations of U.S., Anglo, family therapy, beyond the individual and the family (Flemons and Gralnik 2013). The family therapy systemic and socio-constructionist perspectives on de-pathologizing, des-individualizing, and non-medicalizing understandings of suicide in English, directed our attention toward other places in addition to the evidence-based capitalist marketplace of knowledge. We looked for knowledges in other markets, nonetheless, but perhaps guided by different epistemic economies of knowledge and ethics—divorcing from the capitalist control of knowledge might require much more than shifting reference lists.

We trained in Australasian narrative therapy practices. These oriented us to the understanding that knowledges are also ethical and political (White and Epston 2023). Therefore, it led us to politicize our contextual and relational understanding to suicide. We engaged narrative therapy’s analysis of the constitutive effects of modern power as a determinant of people’s stories about suicide (Newman 2016; Reynolds 2016; Sather 2015; Sather and Newman 2016; White and Morris 2019). Moreover, we begun a dialogue with the work of the Critical Suicide Studies Network (White et al. 2016; Chandler et al. 2022; Marsh 2010). We have been influenced by their ethics and poststructuralist critique to mainstream understanding to suicide prevention, suicide, and its science (Jaworski 2021; Oaten et al. 2023). Their European, discursive, and critical analysis introduced us to the possibilities of alternatives to suicide conceptualizations beyond quantitative and positivist frameworks of research (Hjelmeland 2016); and mainstream suicide prevention as the only ethical framework of response (Marsh et al. 2021). They question the widespread unquestionable and fundamental assumption that suicide must be prevented. Their critique makes visible how the rhetoric of prevention is implicated in the same biomedical, medicalized, individualized, and pathologized conceptualizations of suicide (Marsh et al. 2021; Tack 2019), “installing life as a natural characteristic of bodies that disables suicide as a choice.” (Tack 2019, p. 47).

Parallel to these perspectives and in conversation with them, here we engage the decolonial option (Curiel 2017; Escobar 2020; Espinosa Miñoso 2022; Grosfoguel 2007; Lugones 2008; Mignolo 2021; Quijano 2000; Vázquez 2020) from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe. We are interested in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living (Siu 2011; Fanon 1967; Gordon 2022). This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality1 and its shaping effect on lived experience.

From our various explorations on suicide as therapists, we depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of their particular philosophy (Mignolo 2021). Some perspectives are more dominant than others—depending on how they perform in the standard English capitalist marketplace of knowledge, at any given time. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being, who is to serve as a research laboratory to produce marketable, patriarchal evidence-based suicidology knowledge. “Ontology [the suicidal being] is an epistemological concept [or narrative]; it is not inscribed in the entities the grammatical nouns name.” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 135).

Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from a non-discursive place, and from a different genealogy or ancestry than western Europe’s (Ţichindeleanu 2022)2. We focus on the coloniality of the senses and being (Ţichindeleanu 2022). We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of control, erasure, and violence that capitalism and the perspectives on knowledge and being (Vázquez 2020) in relation to suicide, suicide prevention assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further replicating the invisibility, ninguneo, and dehumanization that imposes death as a constant in life. Our intent is to restitute what modernity has erased.

For our discussion, we quasi-fabricated a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments. We constructed the caller’s text as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. These include Anthony’s lived experiences as a family therapist trainee, and his work in a crisis hotline. Anthony is a first-generation Vietnamese-American California native. marcela is a licensed family therapist and family therapist trainer in U.S. academia; also, a Colombiana, inmigrante, and Spanglish speaker. The call runs all throughout this paper. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings.

2. The Privatization of Death Desires: The Coloniality of the Senses and Aesthetics

I (Anthony) hear her voice on the other side of the line.

Isabela: Hi. My name is Isabela. It’s my first time calling here. I am not sure I should have. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed and helpless. I don’t know what is wrong with me.

Anthony: Hey Isabela. Thanks for calling tonight. It can take a lot of courage to reach out. Sounds like you’re feeling stressed right now. Can you tell me more about what’s been going on for you?

Isabela: Is this conversation recorded? I don’t want the police to come and get me again, it was so traumatic for me the first time. I am undocumented and the police make me very afraid.

Anthony: This conversation isn’t recorded. I understand how scary the police are and that’s the last thing I want for any one of our callers. I’d only have to call emergency services for extreme circumstances, but I want to work with you so that doesn’t happen. Are you still comfortable with continuing this conversation?

Isabela: Yes, I am, thank you for clarifying. I feel like so much is happening at once. I was just released from the psychiatric hospital because I was suicidal. I wanted to die. I have been feeling this way most of my life. But this time the cops came, and it was so scary. The hospital prescribed me pills which just make me feel even worse. I recently lost my job because I wasn’t showing up enough but that’s only because I’m trying to graduate from college. It’s just so embarrassing that my mom has to see me like this. I feel bad for her. She’s an immigrant, undocumented, doesn’t speak English, and here she is a single mother. She ran away from my father who used to beat her up. She brought us here and now she is taking care of my brother and I. Ugh, I want it all to stop.

Anthony: Thanks for sharing that with me. It seems you and your family are going through a lot in your life right now and it makes sense why you’re feeling so overwhelmed. You mentioned being recently released from the hospital and you were there because you were suicidal. I was wondering if you’ve had thoughts of wanting to die in the past few days, including today.

Isabela: I do have thoughts. I always do. A lot, sometimes, not others. But it’s always on my mind and I just want it to end. It’s been a week since I was released, and I just can’t stand the shame of being in that position. I’m such a strain on my family and they’d be better off without me.

Anthony: Thanks for telling me that.

My (Anthony) body shifts. My heart races in urgency. I enter what I can best describe as a state of flow, trying to be compassionate while also prioritizing her safety. A variety of quickened thoughts rush through my head: “Are they safe right now?” “What do I say next?” “I have to manage the means.” “How do I help this person?” Even after five years of doing this work, every call wracks my nerves.

From modernity’s pedagogies and prevention rhetoric, it is expected for Westernized, patriarchal knowledges on suicide assessment to be prioritized by therapists in these instances (control of knowledge). They are to singularly guide our inquiry when conducting an assessment for risk. Ultimately, it is expected of us to form a clinical judgment as an authority of expertise, for decision making on the safest institutionalized (control of power) clinical intervention, being hospitalization, safety plans, treatment, etc. Safety is synonymous for prevention or assuring a living life as the only moral, legal, and healthy reasonable alternative. Any alternative response to life is arbitrarily reduced as immoral, illegal, and psychiatric regardless of the context.

Whether our professional expertise is based on evidence-based knowledges or knowledges of critique of evidence-based understandings on suicide, we are not only caught between the interdependence of the control of knowledge and power. Our senses, although not deemed as reasonable sources for sound clinical judgements, are involved as well but expected to be under our control to avoid clouding our judgment—an example of the coloniality of the senses (Ţichindeleanu 2022). Thus, while we focus on the coloniality of the senses and modernity’s control of aesthetics,3 they are inseparable from the coloniality of power and knowledge (Mignolo 2013; Ţichindeleanu 2022; Vázquez 2020).

Our hearing has been clinically educated toward prevention which overinflates the words “hospitalization”, “helpless”, “I want to die”, “I want it all to stop”. Our sensorial auditory dispositions reposition to these words—the rest might quiet down in the background, if we hear it at all. Although those are the words said from the other side of the hotline or office, the words that reach our clinical ears are “suicidal”, “suicidal”, “suicidal”, “suicidal”, which elevates for us the temperature of the conversation.

Like any of our senses, how we listen and what we listen for has ancestry or genealogy and literacy (Ţichindeleanu 2022). Its history dates back way beyond the date when our academic degrees were posted or our professional licenses conferred by the respective institutions. Guided by the work of decolonial thinkers like the Romanian Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu (2022) on the coloniality of the senses, Mexican Rolando Vázquez (2020) on decolonial aesthetics, and Argentinian Walter Mignolo (2013) on the geopolitics of the senses, we have started to recognize and understand our enfleshed experiences in conversations about suicide beyond merely consuming marketable knowledges in suicidology.

Decolonially, the history of our sensibilities including auditory, or lack thereof, might date back to the 1500s when the first colonial difference (Mignolo 2021) emerged within the context of the violent conquest of the Americas by Europe. It consists of our violent, fictional separation from earth. Europe created the first dichotomous, violent, categorization, the human and the non-human and convinced us of it. This fictitious dichotomy places one in opposition to the other (Ochoa 2016; Curiel and Falconí Trávez 2021; Espinosa Miñoso 2022; Vázquez 2020). Thus, those violently deemed as non-human by western Europe, have no place in the binary but to become objects of the human. The non-human is the conquest-able, exploitable, rapeable, and killable Other object (Lugones 2008; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Without this violent fictional separation, the subsequent development of the idea of the self would not have been possible, nor the suicidal being, the hotline worker, the therapist, and suicidology researcher. According to Ţichindeleanu (2022), French René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and British John Locke’s development of the “self” in the 1700s radically ratified such separation, based on which the current Eurocentric understanding of suicide is predominantly conceived.

Ţichindeleanu (2022) engages a non-discursive genealogy or ancestry of the coloniality of the senses like touch, vision, and voice from his position in eastern Europe. He situated his analysis including the Seven Years War global conflict in the 1700s. This war included France and Britain’s dispute for North America, before the French Revolution, and Central European tensions that killed millions of people. This is the time of the consolidation of the Nation-State kind of governance along with its tactics, including witch hunts, and forms of propriety. In turn, borders and boundaries are created between nations, and national languages, which continues the violent history of separations. Ţichindeleanu (2022) considers this time as the age of defeat rather than the triumph of reason, as it is commonly known. Counter Europe’s forms of peasant and artisan communities’ organization, knowledges, sensibilities, affects, dialects, and spiritualities were defeated. Such defeat was further solidified by Descartes.

After western Europe in the 1500s first fictitiously cut the earth into hierarchically separate parts, the human and non-human, and later cut into Nation-States in the 1700s, Descartes, also in the 1700s, theoretically cut the body in parts when excluding the senses as sources of knowledge formation (Ţichindeleanu 2022). Descartes chopped the body to exclude the senses and to center instead the inner voice in his head as the ultimate and only source of reason and certainty. Therefore, the male voice becomes the source for world inventions in the form of original thought, scientific knowledge, subjectivity, the human self, and consciousness (Ţichindeleanu 2022). This led to the later development of national voices, male authors, and languages and their dictionaries after the French Revolution, according to Ţichindeleanu (2022)—like English, which is the linguistic headquarters for suicidology. The patriarchal inner voice ends up speaking in the name of the world and the earth. Centuries later, the voice is heard as the global authority of mainstream suicidology, in English, speaking in the name of decontextualized global experiences of death desires.

Moreover, borrowing from Descartes development of the inner voice, modeled by his own, Locke develops the self and the consciousness as the absolute separation from the Other (Ţichindeleanu 2022). This could be considered the patriarchal foundation for the configuration of the suicidal being as an absolute separate individual, solely responsible for what is going only in the male-designed head. Ţichindeleanu (2022) calls this inner voice: the impoverished privatized voice. The overinflation of the privatized inner voice, for Ţichindeleanu (2022) reverses the movement of thought from the inside out, making us become further separated from earth, the communal, relationality, and any possibilities of shared knowledges. It positions us with our backs against reality (Ţichindeleanu 2022), unable to see the fracturing oppressive reality of structures of coloniality that put us there. In this reversal of thought, suicidal desires are assumed to come from the inside out; freeing coloniality’s oppressive structures of any responsibilities whatsoever for death desires, remaining in total impunity with no witnesses (X and polanco 2021).

The patriarchal privatized voice has become the independent voice of reason and consciousness, in the image of Descartes—western European, white, male, and European (French)-language speaking. This is the patriarchal voice that leads modernity’s project of civilization, progress, and development. Obviously, for the European eye, and its economy of control, capitalism, this project requires living productive beings, medicated or not. Hence, suicide might be either a threat or a benefit to modernity’s sustainability, depending on which side of the line of humanity (Fanon 1999) and productivity people who kill themselves fall. We say more later when we discuss the coloniality of being and the hierarchical separations within the category of the human.

The development of the privatized inner voice, according to Ţichindeleanu (2022), is at the same time the beginning of the privatization of the organs, the eyes, mouth, skin, ears, etc. In turn, it has made possible for modernity’s aesthetics to control subjectivity or being (Vázquez 2020; Ţichindeleanu 2022). The privatized, voice inside the head relegates the senses, emotions and rest of the body of both the human and non-human as something not to be trusted and therefore not to be the sources of knowledge (Ţichindeleanu 2022). The senses are to be controlled for the sake of reason (Vázquez 2020). For Vázquez, aesthetics is one of the means of control by modernity. It demands the regulation of the senses and the separation of the worlds of sensing from reason to not cloud experts’ judgements, in this case. We believe that among the many things mental health professions do, they also serve as an instrument of modernity’s aesthetics by controlling our senses. We miss-contextualize, medicate, and degrade the senses, and consider them as un-reason-able or maladaptive, like death desires. For Vázquez, modernity/coloniality have determined

“…how we have been taught to see, how we have been taught to talk, how we have been taught to listen and perceive the world. We have done this so often, inadvertently becoming spectators, performing the model of dominant perception. Dominant perception is not just blind; it is, worryingly, an indolent perception. The indolence towards the rest of world performs erasure through representation”

(Wevers 2019, p. 3)

Our headed clinical reasoning, where rushing Eurocentric marketable thoughts pass through such as: “Are they safe right now?”, “What do I say next?”, “I have to manage the means”, “How do I help this person?” have taught us to talk, listen, and perceive experiences as suicide risks and erase others. We have become professional spectators when relaying on the seeming certainty of research, rather based on the impoverished patriarchal privatized voice of the Eurocentric representations of the suicidal that make the capitalist industry of suicide rich. Our privatized voice of prevention, home for suicidology expertise, has been overinflated by modernity over our sensing. The knowledges that come from the relational encounters with the urgent movements of the heart at various rates, in communication with the nerves’ experiences being wracked, when receiving someone’s story, must be professionalized. Put differently, we must turn off our senses and render them silent, shoving them deep down our throats with a deep breath, far away from our brain functioning and mental health. In this way, they do not leave our bodies to reveal themselves. More importantly, they will not cloud our judgement on the deemed un-reason-able and untrusting suicidal person. Our bodies, modernity’s proprietary forms of control, keep imprisoned sensibilities of reception, many of which have now gone unrecognizable for us. Quite frankly, our throats have been caught by surprise by how much labor they have had to endure by our chosen profession—working overtime, isolated, with no relational compensation in the name of modernity’s expert rhetoric of help, safety, and prevention.

3. The Time of Suicide: The Politics of Time

Anthony: I can see that these thoughts are pretty recent. Can I ask if you’ve done anything today to end your life?

Isabela: Not today, no. I was thinking about taking these pills the hospital prescribed. I figured it’d be painless. I’m just a bit hesitant to take them right now, which is why I called you.

Anthony: I’m curious about this hesitancy you’re talking about, but I want to make sure you are safe to continue this conversation. Can I ask where those pills are right now?

Isabela: They’re in a cabinet in my bathroom.

Anthony: Thanks for telling me that. Can we agree to not access those pills for the remainder of this phone call and move to a different room from the pills?

Isabela: Yes. I can do that.

While I (Anthony) wait for Isabela to come back, I take a deep breath and quickly scribble notes in hopes I catch everything she is saying (or our Eurocentrically trained ears are controlled to hear). I summarize on my notepad, “Isabela, suicidal, hospitalization, traumatic history with police.”

We assess imminent risk. Is this person likely to kill herself today after she hangs up the phone or people leave our offices? The politics of time are at play here. According to Vázquez (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015), talking about the present, implies talking simultaneously about time (now) and space (here). When we talk about the here, we talk about the now and the other way around. In modernity, time is therefore reduced to the present space as it is the only way to control it. Furthermore, agreeing with Vázquez, for modernity, the present is the only reality that counts—presence and space have the monopoly over what is real (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015). The assessment of the caller or the client’s experiences of suicide risk are reduced to the present temporal space. The person is not suicidal or cannot be involuntarily hospitalized if they plan to kill themselves in a year; or tried to kill themselves 10 years ago.

Modernity’s technologies of power regarding suicidology—assessments, research, Eurocentric pedagogies—are based on modernity’s linear tempo-spatial understanding of time. The certainty of the reality of suicidality is assessed in its presence only. The past, history, and ancestry are dead because they are seen as not controllable or subject to assessments, but a risk factor. The future is a utopia where the fictional promises of life, progress, and development of modernity live (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015). The time and space of the suicidal assessment is the only reality we zoom into as what is real—“have you done anything today to end your life?”

Therefore, Eurocentric conceptualizations of suicide prevention subscribe primarily to modernity’s temporality of the present. The present is what can be assessed, controlled, manipulated, classified, consumed, destroyed, or rendered marketable (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015). Furthermore, the chronology or chronological linear experience of time in suicidality is also at the center of modernity’s control. Modernity imposes a universal, linear, and chronological order to conceive time (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015). Any deliberate interruption of the expected naturalized chronology of one’s life, by one’s hand, is socially and politically chastised. Anything that does not match modernity’s temporality of death is criminalized, deemed immoral, and psychiatric.

Temporal discriminations lead us to inquire about the risk contained in the present of suicide desires, previous attempts, plans, and ideations. Memory and remembering are excluded as sites of struggle (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015; Vázquez 2020). Other temporal connections to memory and remembering are erased. Furthermore, knowledge wise, our assessments are expected to follow the most recent research or innovative research deemed superior. Modernity’s temporal rhetoric prevents liberation from other temporalities of life that diverge from knowledges of innovation and the contemporary that come from non-Eurocentric locations. It denigrates memory, history, and non-European worlds (Ţichindeleanu 2022; Vázquez 2020).

Decolonially, for Vázquez (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015), time is not only subject to its appearance in space. Time contains a plurality of everything lived. Time is an emerging open plurality of lived experiences, memories, ancestries, worlds, and relationships with worlds that are not contained in the presence of the present; “…la pluralidad del tiempo vivido se antepone al orden espacial, a la metafísica de la presencia, al principio de realidad de la modernidad.” (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015, p. 81). Time precedes presence.

Furthermore, time is not linear, nor circular or has any other geometrical reference (Mignolo 2021; Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015). For Vázquez (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015), time is relational, put before a radical plurality. Vázquez has not deepened but widened our conception of ongoing connections with memory. A relational sense of time facilitates to rescue “memory as a site of struggle…that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past…and understand the widespread injustice and violence of modernity/coloniality” (Vázquez 2009, p. 111). The temporal–spatial perspective to suicide reduced to the present obscures the widespread violence of coloniality that produces death desires, as we discuss below under the coloniality of being.

Relational time for Vázquez (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015) is an evermoving dimension that emerges as presence, not in its totality. The space and presence of memories could be understood from Vázquez as outcomes emerging from the interactions (in no geometrical order) of all the memories and the multiplicities of lived experience that make us, including the making of death desires. Therefore, decoloniality, for Vázquez, seeks to call for a relational time, to transform the order of presence from times that have been silenced, ignored, and that contain other possibilities and relationalities (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015, p. 82). If death desires are listened to not from a linear but from a relational and plurality sense of time, the lived multiplicity of experiences, always in movement, in front of the space of the assessment would have conversational room to be received and listened to; along with many other desires spilling over the present, to construct realities that are not present but that do exist in time.

4. Listening?

The complexities of my being are reduced and belittled to risk factors

With tests and tells to define my being and body

My identity stripped and replaced

Anthony Pham

Anthony: I know earlier you said you were having suicidal thoughts. This might sound weird but “On a scale of 1–5, where 1 is you’re not likely to kill yourself today and 5 is you’re very likely to kill yourself today, where are you on that scale right now?”

Knowing the caller is suicidal, I (Anthony) know I have to ask the scaling question.

All hotline workers where I work must verbatim ask the Self-Rated Intent (SRI)4 question at the beginning and end of every call. They must persist in doing so. The conversation or inquiry cannot proceed until they answer this safety question. Although the “self” in the “self-rating” scale intends to give agency to the caller to assess their own risk, it could be understood as well as a self-incriminating scale. The caller assesses their risk, assuming they are relying on their (privatized) voice, but the parameters from which their answer is assessed comes from the scale and its developers’ philosophies and research. Their answer activates the corresponding professional and institutional responses with no ambivalence. Ratings of 4 to 5 may likely lead to emergency services being activated.

No matter how many times I (Anthony) ask the question, I sense the awkwardness in doing this every time. The pictures of my friends and our connections in the background, slowly turn into ashes from the fire coming from the other side of the hotline. I feel disconnected from a sense of humanity. It is as if I turned into another of Elon Musk’s robotic, mass-produced technological creations, ignoring whatever environmental considerations on my path—I want to help but how I help seems destructive. No matter the temperature of the conversation, I feel that I must demand from the caller the required information at present time. This technology makes me feel out of place; but my voice knows what to do. Without effort, as smooth as a Tesla, I shift from a more casual tone to a more formal one, as I have been trained to do. But I don’t feel myself and I don’t hear Isabela anymore.

Modernity’s aesthetic pedagogies and technologies are instruments of control of the senses, as we discussed above, whereby our ears are educated to listen in a way that the person blends into the characterizations of the suicidal representation in assessment protocols of prevention. They become one. The sound of the person’s words and the research representations of the caller merge into one although the pitch of the latter dominates the former, being what we ultimately hear. Once again, we turn our back to realities (Ţichindeleanu 2022)—relational realities, that is—centering academia and professionalism as the only reality we listen to and see. We no longer hear the person, we hear the caller, the client, the patient, or research participant. The suicide caller is an aesthetic Eurocentric representation constructed by our controlled senses. Eurocentric, English knowledge takes priority in our act of listening. The act of listening therefore changes (Ţichindeleanu 2022).

Furthermore, from this perspective, for Ţichindeleanu (2022) the senses are actions—senses do sensing. Sensing could be understood as knowledges crawling under our skin and perception to materialize in the act of listening (Ţichindeleanu 2022). Thus, suicidal desires, or rather desirings, are Eurocentric knowledges and practices getting under the therapist’s skin and perception, distorting our ears to listen from desires as if they are coming from the inside, as we discussed above. Not understanding the senses as actions and listening coming from a genealogy and literacy that shape the way we respond, agreeing with Ţichindeleanu (2022), makes us not respond to how modernity controls our subjectivity and sensing—it is anti-liberatory. Therefore, we are interested in listening as a political practice (Dreher and Mondal 2018) of liberation.

Caller: I think I’m at a 3. I’ve been having so many suicidal thoughts these past few days but I’m just hesitant to do anything now.

Anthony: Thanks for answering that question for me. I know it can be hard for some people to open up about their thoughts, but I want to commend you for taking that first step in helping yourself. I’m curious about this hesitancy you’re having. What’s making you hesitant to end your life?

I (Anthony) feel more relaxed. I can be myself again. My friends in the pictures of the wall are coming back from the ashes. Hearing a score of 3 puts me at ease—my clinical judgment highly relies on the temporality and certainty of the SRI experts’ reason. Isabela’s life is strictly represented in the scale. Hence, a cool sense of relief rushes from my feet to my head as pressured water extinguishing the fire—gladly, requiring much less gallons per minute of water than the water used to put out the recent fires in Upper Bidwell Park, in East of Chico, California, that burned 401,279 acres total.

The fire is contained. The danger is not imminent. No emergency calls. No traumatic interventions by police; and a caller who, persuaded by my (Anthony) rhetoric of safety, agreed to stay safe at this moment by the action of moving away from the pills. The score provides highly reliable, reasonable, scientific, and objective certainty about the caller’s safety. There is room for some exploration now. What are the knowledges that will guide my exploration now that the risk for safety is not imminent? I relax back in my chair; my heart rate slows. The body knows—it has become an expert in interpreting SRI scores, and thus acts accordingly. Is my sense of humanity returning to me? I shift my tone to a more casual one, wanting to explore as many details as possible about what Isabela is going through.

5. Political Commitments

Isabela: I’ve been having suicidal thoughts all my life. The thought of not existing does not always scare me—not many people would even know. But I think sometimes of the shame that will come to my family. I don’t know if the fight is worth fighting for people like us. I still go to school and take care of my little brother. College expenses are a lot. I can’t work full time. My family doesn’t have much.

Anthony: I hear you. I’m glad that hesitancy gave you the opportunity to give me a call so I can support you through this. Does anyone in your life know what you’re going through right now? Anyone supportive that comes to mind? I know you mentioned your family possibly feeling ashamed.

Isabela: Yes, my mom knows because she picked me up from the hospital. At first, she was angry at me for even thinking about suicide and involving the police, but she eventually came around. My mom tries to be supportive of me but it’s just hard. I just feel like I’m adding more to her motherly responsibilities. I don’t have anyone else. It is not easy for me to make friends in college. And, I haven’t told my little brother.

Anthony: Do you think your little brother would be supportive of you during this time?

Isabela: I guess he would. He’s only 11 and I don’t want to expose him to all this. He is going through his own things at his school.

Anthony: I know you talked about shame coming onto your family as well as not wanting to expose your little brother from what you’re going through. It seems to me you are a protective person looking out for her family.

Isabela: Thank you for saying that. I try to support my family, especially my little brother. It’s just hard right now with all the responsibilities.

Anthony: Yeah that sounds like a lot of work and I’m glad you recognize the role you have in your family. I know you’ve been feeling suicidal for the past week, but I wanted to ask how you are coping with all of this. What does your daily life look like?

Isabela: I don’t know. Everything is so overwhelming with school and family. It’s hard for me to actually cope with anything. I don’t know if putting down your thoughts in writing is coping but I write a lot.

Anthony: I’m glad you have that for yourself. Writing can be pretty impactful and evidently so. How long have you been journaling?

Isabela: I’ve been journaling all my life, including my thoughts on death since I was a kid. I write a lot about my brother too.

Anthony: I’m amazed at how great of an older sister you are and I’m glad journaling is something you find helpful. I see a lot of strength within you. How does it feel to talk this through with someone?

Isabela: It feels great to have someone to talk to. I think I’m feeling a bit better now. Thank you for listening to me.

Anthony: I know I asked this question earlier, but I wanted to ask it again: “On a scale of 1–5, where 1 is you’re not likely to kill yourself today and 5 is you’re very likely to kill yourself today, where are you on that scale right now?”

Isabela: I think I’m at a 2 right now. The thoughts are less intense, but my responsibilities are still overwhelming.

Anthony: Well, I’m glad you were able to go down on that scale. I want you to know that you can call back anytime, okay?

Isabela: Thanks, I will.

Eurocentric strengths-based perspectives (“It seems to me that you are a protective person”, “I am amazed at how great of an older sister you are”); development of coping mechanisms (“How are you coping with all of this”); and consolidation of communities of support in the present (“Does anyone in your life know what you’re going through right now? Anyone supportive that comes to mind?”) seem to be embedded in modernity’s temporality that reduces the person’s reality to the present time and space. Thus, inadvertently, these perspectives discriminate against a multiplicity of experiences from other temporalities, as we discussed above, including experiences and desires in relation to death. Yet, in our roles, we have been in conversation with folks who describe conversations guided by these perspectives, as helpful, lifesaving, and transformative.

Despite the evidence of modernity’s parameters of effectiveness (based on Eurocentric technologies), ethically addressing suicidality predominantly or exclusively from Eurocentric patriarchal perspectives of the present puts at risk the erasure of the historical conditions of racialized people, further fading their historical experiences into oblivion. Adapting Lithuanian French Emmanuel Levinas, we could say that the pursuit of effectiveness in reducing suicide rates among the global population is not the same, and therefore it should not be a priority over the ethical responsibility to the other. (It is worth noting that Levinas’ Other, from his conceptual and ethical legacy of his Jewish ancestry, might not be entirely the same Other as in the coloniality of being we discuss here which emerges from the ancestries of the Abya Yala and the Caribbean from the Indigenous, Peasant, and Black experience.)

The preservation of the suicidology expertise does seem to take primacy over relational listening to those whose humanities have been denied. Therefore, the pluralities of lived experiences and conditions of many racialized people, specifically related to death, continue to have no consequence (Dhanvantari 2024). We share the U.S. American, Lewis Ricardo Gordon (2016) sentiment, to not

“…fetishize our disciplines and their methods. We seek, instead, to go beyond them into a communicative practice of what illuminates and opens our understanding. Thus, every resource is useful [in] the extent to which we don’t fetishize, ontologize, or inflate their purpose. The task is to articulate where each is most relevant. Thus, in my work, I think relationally in a search for relevance”

(p. 25)

We seek to go beyond the fetishization of any of the perspectives we were trained in, as we discuss toward the beginning. We have a relational interest in the lived multiplicity of experiences connected to the imposed conditions by the coloniality of being, whereby death has a dominant place, and a different temporality related to inhumanity. We engage decoloniality without intent to fetishize it. We adopt the decolonial term coloniality of being to make visible other temporalities of death desires. However, we understand decoloniality as an option, here to address inhumanity and suicide. But as one of his proponents puts it, is not the only option, the best one, more ethical, or even a required one (Mignolo 2021).

6. Inhumanity and Non-Existence: Coloniality of Being

For the Náuatl/Pipil/Chinese writer, born in Honduras, Oriel María Siu (2011), suicide could be understood from different perspectives. It could be an act of resistance and autonomy in the face of objectification, or an alternative response to a socio-historical reality. Furthermore, it could also be understood as a conscious act, autonomous, toward the interruption of the historical inscription of power on the body. Siu makes these arguments from her reading on discursive practices in Foucault’s sense. However, it is her intent to shift the location of enunciation of the exploration of suicide departing instead from the genealogy or ancestry of the coloniality of being, following the work of Martinique Frantz Fanon (1967, 1999) and Puerto Rican Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2017).

Siu (2011) explores suicide from the experiences of the characters in Salvadorian Oscar René Benítez novela, “Inmortales” (Benítez 1983). Published in Español, it is the first novela in the U.S. on the Central American diaspora in Los Angeles, California. The Inmortales, in Benitez’s novela, are undocumented immigrants, who like more than 11.0 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. (Pew Research Center 2024), continue enduring violently the implications of the genocidal fracture of the earth in the 1500s as humans and non-humans, and 1700s as Nation-States with borders and languages. The separation of land and bodies, and capitalism, have created the conditions for undocumented, racialized people, to live in degraded conditions of invisibility, abandonment, with no rights, and as socially and politically insignificant (Siu 2011). Under these circumstances, agreeing with Siu (2011), many racialized communities have no possibilities to undertake any substantial changes in their lives.

As in the lives of Benitez’s characters, many racialized people live under the constant threat of death. They live in conditions of non-existence. Their death, whatever the means, has no social repercussions, as much as their lives. Decolonially, living a life from conditions of non-existence is directly connected to the coloniality of being—it is the kind of life and being that coloniality’s separations produce. Therefore, Siu (2011) argues from coloniality that the suicide of many racialized people who live in conditions of non-existence, is nothing other than the reaffirmation of their everyday experiences of invisibility, perishability, and expendability. Suicide is not an act of resistance or response, from this perspective, but a (temporal) statement emerging out of a life lived in a multiplicity in which death became a part of the day by day. For the colonial being death is constitutive of a person’s daily life, as a highly likely reality at any given time. Rather than living a life in which death is in the future, for the colonized death is a daily, intimate, life-time companion (Fanon 1967; Gordon 2015).

In Maldonado-Torres (2007) explorations of being (with reference to Heidegger and Levinas while centering his discussion on Fanon), the coloniality of being refers to the implications of the coloniality of power, and thus modernity, in lived experiences and their racial and gender expressions. This reflects the lived multiplicity of experience generated by the violent, patriarchal separations of the human and non-human we discussed above, which further sustains these divisions (Curiel 2017; Lugones 2008). Europe further separated the human by inventing the ideas of gender and race (Lugones 2008). Based on the non-ethics of war, for Maldonado-Torres, racial and gender separations forms relations of domination, as in the conqueror—white, cis male, and the conquered. The human is separated into hierarchical degrees of humanity. The white, cis male, conqueror is the superior. The less human is inferior and placed under a permanent suspicion. Their humanity is permanently under question (Maldonado-Torres 2007). Although appearing to be possessing human features, the humanity of the less human is always suspicious. The conquered human is therefore not human in the colonial sense in which the conqueror made himself human. This is at the heart of the modern experience. Modernity has naturalized the logic of war through degrees of humanities (Espinosa Miñoso et al. 2022; Lugones 2008).

Prior to René Descartes “I think therefore I am”, for the Argentinian Mexican philosopher, Enrique Dussel (2013), the conquistadores gave expression to an ideal of subjectivity of the human, that he defined as the “I conquer, therefore I am”. According to the Puerto Rican Grosfoguel, Descartes’ “I think” would not have been possible without the experience first of the “I conquer”. For Grosfoguel (2009), the “I conquer” es equivalente to “I exterminate”. Furthermore, agreeing with Dussel (2013) and Grosfoguel (2009), for someone like Descartes to think of himself—his privatized voice in his head and perception—as the center of the world, and speak in the name of the world, he must have come from the experience of conquering the world first.

The superior existence of the conqueror—characterized by devalued senses, overinflated reason, linear temporality, Eurocentric knowledge and languages, authority, and capitalist market—can only be affirmed through the binary logic of modernity, which posits the inferiority of the barbarian, conquered, or racialized peoples. The conqueror is not a conqueror if there is nothing or no one to conquer. The treating expert on suicidality is not an expert if there are no suicidal beings to treat expertly. To define himself as a conqueror, simultaneously he must define the Other, voiceless, less human, non-being, conquered. Hence, the conqueror superior is a being in relation to the barbarian non-being.

Coloniality, and thus modernity, will endure as long as the violent, non-ethic encounters between the male conqueror and the conquered continue. This, in turn, legitimizes the patriarchal dynamics of possession. The racialized person has been voided by the conqueror of any possibilities of giving “because what he or she [or them] has has been taken from him or her [or them]” (Maldonado-Torres 2007). This colonial encounter discriminates against any possibilities of generous, loving, friendly, and communal connections and exchanges, like the ones some of us keep close as pictures on the walls in our home offices as reminders.

Furthermore, the conqueror’s superiority and humanity is founded on certainty, as we know from the discussion on Ţichindeleanu’s work above, which turns the conditions of existence of the barbarian uncertain, in contrast, and always under question. The unquestionable superiority of the conqueror is defined in relation to the perpetually questionable humanity of the barbarian. According to Maldonado-Torres (2007), skepticism becomes the means to reach certainty and superiority as a solid foundation of the self. This is the kind of skepticism that questions specifically the very humanity of racialized peoples and renders unquestionable the conqueror’s humanity.

The inferior, racialized, non-being, questionably human, or less-human confronts the reality of its own finitude day to day (Maldonado-Torres 2007). While death, by suicide or otherwise, is an extraordinary event for human beings, for racialized people considered less-human, it is an ordinary affair—just another day. Suicide, murder, or rape become day-to-day occurrences and an ongoing threat under modernity/coloniality’s control of subjectivity or being. Maldonado-Torres (2007) writes that killability and rapeability, and we would add here suicideability, are inscribed into the images of the colonial bodies. Death is part of their living, marking unlivability, paradoxically, a way of living with an uncertain temporality of death, as in Fanon’s (1967, p. 13) “death in life” and Gordon’s (2015, p. 105) “living death”. The racialized being is condemned to a non-being and non-existing. Invisibility and dehumanization become the primary expressions of the coloniality of being in a non-human or rather an inhuman world. Hence, whose hand does the killing, ultimately might not make a difference for modernity and coloniality—suicide and genocide are all the same part of modernity’s non-ethics of war and extermination—it is a genocidal suicide. Where it does matter is in the visibility of responsibility. The risk of conceptualizing genocide as suicide is that suicide becomes an exclusive problem for therapists or mental health workers, who are trained to tracing privatized organs, starting from the killing hand all the way to the un-reason-able mind of the person whose life they want to save. Meanwhile, the sociopolitical and capitalist structures of coloniality’s hand goes free as a bird (X and polanco 2021).

The racialized beings in Benitez’s Immortals are non-existing Central American undocumented women, who escaped the violence of civil war in their countries to find themselves isolated, living in anonimato, and invisibility in Los Angeles society to experience a new kind of violence and capitalist exploitation. For Siu (2011), the undocumented characters in the novela—as in the novela modernity/coloniality wrote for the global world that many of us live in as the only real reality—are the ever mortals in the opposite racialized colonial sense as in Jacinta’s suicide letter, one of the characters in the novela:

“Me despido […], de todas las injusticias de la tierra y de todos aquellos que colaboraron con mi autodestrucción, haciéndome sentir como una persona insignificante, sin ningún interés social. También quiero despedirme con un fuerte abrazo de todos los latinos indocumentados, de las sirvientas, de los lavaplatos y de las costureras, porque sé muy bien, que seremos inmortales como las mismas injusticias”.

(Benítez 1983, p. 115)

The ever-mortal racialized characters are the immortals in the opposite sense in that killing oneself reproduces and renders immortal the reality that death is part of her existence. It confirms the immortality of inexistence and invisibility of all immortals that Jacinta said goodbye to: “I also want to say goodbye with a big hug to all undocumented latinos, the maids, the dishwashers, and the seamstresses, because I know very well, we will be immortals like the injustices themselves” (marcela’s translation). The conditions of their mortality, suicideability, will remain immortal as long as the technologies, capitalist structures, and ideologies created by the fictions of modernity/coloniality do so as well. Us, as therapists, inadvertently continue to be spectators of such immortality with our indolent fidelity toward modernity’s rhetoric of help and prevention focused on privatized behaviors, cognitions, and emotions of the present.

Anthony: If it’s alright with you I’d like to transition to make a safety plan with you, just want to see what you’ll be doing after this phone call. Is that okay with you?

Isabela: Yeah, for sure. I think after this call, I’m going to make myself some dinner and maybe some journaling. Afterwards maybe watching a show with my brother.

Anthony: That sounds amazing. I wanted to ask if you wanted a follow-up call for tomorrow, just to check up on how you were doing.

Isabela: I think I’ll be okay. Thanks for offering. I’ll call back whenever I need to.

Anthony: Sounds good, take care Isabela.

7. A Coming Home Care: Healing the Colonial Wound

Care, decolonially, aims at shifting pedagogies toward an openness for people (in the role of therapists) to receive stories of suicidal desires and gift back ethical engagements and political commitments toward a responsibility for a livable earth. This means to begin “to respond to the story that suicide tells” (Ansloos and Peltier 2021, p. 115). For that, we must listen. Thus, our backs need to turn back to face relational realities and worlds of sensing life and death from a different aesthetics than suicide assessments. This might be possible from a relational listening that re-engages different sensing and perceiving death connected to always moving lived experiences from the communal, friendships, food sharing, livingbeinghoods in a pluriversality of times, some emerging in the present, and sometimes in non-national languages (i.e., Spanglish, Fenglish, Chinglish, Black Speak, etc.).

We are interested in shared knowledges from where to restitute a livable earth, ethically. What has been relegated to oblivion becomes available as possibilities of restitution (Vázquez 2020) toward autonomous healing (Polanco 2024): autonomous in relation to modernity, carried by the “putamente radicales unfuckwithables” (Polanco 2024, p. 62), with humanities beyond the human and non-human features, and with capabilities of reception and sharing and not production and consumption (Polanco 2024; Vázquez 2020). For Dominican Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (2022), this is a coming home—not as in a heroic gesture, but as a loving and necessary reconstitution from the experience of the wound—healing the colonial wound from our separations from earth. This would require rendering questionable our roles of help, founded on patriarchal violent non-ethics of war. And, also to make our questions questionable to advance alternative understandings and sensing of life and death that continue to make visible the fictional narratives of modernity/coloniality (Espinosa Miñoso 2022), suicide and prevention. We ought to shift our sensing to re-exist (Albán Achinte 2017) and change the geography of reason (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012) and suicide. We want to go beyond our expected intentionality of causing individual behavioral changes as a solution for someone to not kill themselves—with the Eurocentric patriarchal arrogance of wanting to save another life only so that they can continue to live in hell.

Isabela: Bye.

I (Anthony) put the phone down. I take a deep breath. I write up my report and proceed to finish my school report on Eurocentric life-saving therapy practices and wait for the next call until the end of my shift. The cycle continues.