The mimetic power of suicide. A study about the characteristics of experiencing suicide of others

In this paper the experience of another person's suicide is addressed. Clinical and sociological observations attest the fact that witnessing another person's suicide as an imminent or immediately completed event may influence one's own suicidal ideation. Our thesis is that prereflective, intersubjective experience of other person's suicide raises explicit retrospective questions about the meaning of suicide for the other and provokes explicit questions about the potential meaning of suicide for myself. In the first part of the article, experiences of another person's suicide are described as immediate, short-term, long-term, and other. Then, drawing on a phenomenological description of intersubjectivity and on the theory of mimesis, we characterize the experience of another person's suicide in terms of the mimetic power of suicide. Our two main conclusions: a) Every experience of another person's suicide bears a mimetic quality which implies the potential reflection of one's own suicide (not necessarily increasing his or her suicide risk), and, b) Surviving a suicide attempt and overcoming a suicidal crisis can bear this mimetic quality. The last insight should inform some strategies for suicide prevention, e.g. mass media reporting.