Grant: Project Grant

With at least 3900 Canadians lost to suicide each year, identifying the factors thought to lead to suicide risk is a top priority of scientific researchers and clinicians. Recently, neuroscience researchers identified biomarkers that they believe reflect suicide risk acquired over the life course as a result of specific negative experiences. These experiences include child abuse, which is thought to lead to measurable neurobiological changes that have durable and tangible effects. Researchers argue that these "embodied" forms of vulnerability are associated with the development of personality traits directly related to increased risk of suicidal behaviour. In this project we ask: what understandings of suicide risk are emerging in specific forms of scientific and psychiatric research? How do emerging notions of vulnerability overlap or not? We will examine the extent to which studies of biomarkers for suicide risk might change people's understandings of choice, risk, and volition as well as beliefs about appropriate management of suicide risk if it comes to be understood as "in the brain". Drawing on a unique, long-term engagement with a team of clinical and molecular researchers, this project traces intersecting notions of psychiatric vulnerability within the fields of developmental research, neuroscience, and environmental epigenetics. Based on qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, this empirically grounded study focuses on three intersections: (1) of the lab and the clinic, (2) of epigenetics and neuroanatomical studies, and (3) of prospective cohort studies and retrospectively produced models of neuropsychiatric risk. This project will offer a clarifying role of the specific nature of risk emerging at each of these intersections along with the implications of these risk models for addressing psychiatric conditions and suffering in the 21st century, at the crossroads of different sciences, experiences of suffering, and health care.