Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
One of the things I talked about today, was about
culture being something that everybody has.
There's no such thing as a "right culture" or a "wrong culture",
we all have culture, we all have different ways of viewing the world
which has been programmed into us from an early age.
Well, culture is an important part of identity,
but that doesn't get you too far, because
one of the things we're not taught to do as clinicians
is often how to assess somebody's identity.
Often that gets confused or mixed up with
notions around personality as well as identity,
and sometimes culture as well.
So one of the things that we're interested in doing
through the research that I'm involved in is
looking at identity through the issue of belonging
of people's sense of belonging.
Whether their sense of belonging to a history, a family story, a place.
A particular nationality, maybe, a particular religion, a particular gender.
And once you start having conversations about belonging,
it opens up different ideas and probably more,
some productive conversations you can have about belonging.
It also generates ideas about treatment as well.
There has been some work, not a lot of work, done
around the issue of identity and suicide,
and there's two areas where the issue seems to be important.
One is with people who've got a "damaged autobiography".
In other words they have a personal narrative,
a way of describing how they got to this point,
which often lacks details or is vague
compared to a comparison group of people.
And that's probably important in several different ways:
one is that it's an indication of a,
I suppose, a damaged sense of belonging.
But also, one of the things that happens
when people have had that "damaged autobiography"
is that they often don't learn how to solve problems properly.
That they've experienced people not solving problems, usually,
and they don't seem to have learned how to solve problems effectively.
So that applies to their personal life as well.
So often when they're faced with real big difficulties,
they end up being stuck, and if they can't ignore the problems,
one solution is to harm yourself,
to temporarily take yourself out of the situation,
or even to kill yourself.
People who have an impaired sense of being connected, or an impaired sense of belonging
are more likely to be suicidal or have more suicidal thoughts than people who aren't.
One of the things that is important in the ACCESS Study that we've been doing
is with face to face therapy.
An important part of that is engagement
and an important part of engagement is understanding
how people have got to this point in their lives.
What is the meaning of them trying to kill themselves
or harming themselves, which has gotten them into this study.
What does that.. How do they understand it?
What does that mean?