When Silence Speaks: A Reflection on Engaging in Expressive Arts Activities and Thoughts of Suicide

Lydia Gitau ()
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Lydia Gitau: Big Anxiety Research Centre, Faculty of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2021, Australia

Social Sciences, 2025, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-12

Abstract: Deep, potent silences sometimes underlie thoughts of suicide. This paper presents a personal reflection of silence as a form of expression, and examines how engaging in expressive arts activities may reveal and help in processing feelings of distress and thoughts of suicide. There is an additional layer of hegemony that the use of words adds to discussions of suicidality, which makes these discussions inaccessible to many of the disenfranchised, including people from a refugee background for whom English is not a first language. But, for those struggling with speaking the (English) language in the first place, at what level of language acquisition can they be deemed fit to express and accurately represent their thoughts and ideas about suicide? Does their silence count? And so, by tackling this dilemma, this paper seeks to examine alternative ways of expression that do not heavily rely on words. It explores how, in our undertaking of suicidality studies creatively, we may embody and dignify the ways of the marginalised that have been devalued by a colonialist or interventionist agenda. The paper is an exercise in re-writing their experiences from the critical consciousness of coloniality. It is a disassembling of the control, domination, and exploitation that words can have. It is an attempt to shift the source and profile of knowledge about suicide from those who wield the power and privilege of words to those who live in the margins, shielded by silence.

Keywords: silence; suicide; power; expressive arts; words; distress; language (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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