Finished My Exihibition

I changed a little bit, because I couldn't buy some injectors and operating knives, so I just hung a rope, besides, two alcohol bottles are crowded so I just put one, and I crashed the beer bottle to render the problem is serious.

Other classmates exhibition:

Ideas of My Exhibits in Our Studio

How to express my research topic - suicide in a little block of a shelf in our studio? It also should be creatvie, visual and clear. I gave some thoughts today and decided to set a theme for my exhibit - a girl killed herself, and I will also tell her story via background pictures and exhibits.


Foreground: a pair of red high heel and two alcohol bottles.
Hangings: common suicide tools - an injector, a sharp knife, a bottle of drugs, and a rope.
Background: bloody tearing pictures of the character's life (story telling)













Pictures I might use in the background:

Alcohol, Drugs, Self-harm, Attention Seeking, Parasuicide and Suicide

Dringk and drugs

Many people (especialy teens) use drink or drugs to help them forget about their problems. However, alcohol and drugs can make depression worse and affect a person's ability to think straight. One young person in every three who commits suicide is drunk or on drugs.

Parasuicide

Parasuicide is when people make a suicide attempt, but do not actually want to kill themselves. It is sometimes called deliberate self-harm. Usually, they take an overdose and then call a friend or the emergency services. Or they may carry out the act in a place where they hope to be found and helped. Sadly, this does not always happen. Help may not arrive until it is too late.

Parasuicide is not the same as when people delebertely harm themselves in less serious ways. For example, some people may cut themselves when they feel very stressed or upset. This is not life-threatening, and they do it because the pain somehow helps them.

A call for help

Parasuicide is usually a 'cry for help' from people, usually girls, who have trouble coping with their problems. They suffer from the same kind of difficulties as those who actually do commit suicide. They may feel it is the only way to make the people around them understand how bad, or how angry they are feeling. SOme teenagers commit parasuicide because they want to frighten someone who has upset them and 'make them sorry'. This is very dangerous because some parasuicides end in death.

Parasuicide also shows how confused many people are. They may want to take drastic action or even kill themselves, but often change their minds quite quickly. Few people are 100 per cent certain that they want to die. Even when they feel at their worst, there is nearly always a part of them that clings to life.

People who commit parasuicide may be told they are attention-seekers or time-wasters. Their families may be very angry and upset, making the person feel even more miserable and guilty. However, people who have committed parasuicide should be taken seriously. They are likely to try it again, and are up to twenty times, more likely than the general population to finally take their own lives.

Reference

Claire Wallerstein (2004) Need to Know Teenage Suicide. United Kingdom, Roger Coote Publishing. p. 18, p. 27

suicideTALK

I attended the 'suicideTALK' training course today, and got some useful information from this class.

By talking with the total 20 attendees (except me) in the class, I found that almost all the people are studying in medicine or psychology in University of Dundee, and they came to the class not because they are interested in how to help suicidal people, because as a medicine or a psychology student, the major required them to have some knowledge about how to deal with suicidal people, they said: "actually I have no idea about what I'm gonna to do/say if someone tell me they want to kill themselves." So I asked them: "how about if you want to commit suicide but not sure if it is a reasonable choice, so you feel that you need someone to help you on your confusion. If in this situation, will you tell your best friend you want to commit suicide?" The answer is surprising, almost all the people said they won't tell others around, even counselors, one medicine student said: "no, I won't tell anyone I want to kill myself, even professional councelling, cuz I know people don't know what they can do for me, just like us, we don't know what we should do for the suicidal people either, and we perhaps feel like the person who want to commit suicide might be have something wrong with them, I mean mentally or psychiatrically." The answer drove me to think about the meaning of counselling. Although there are many organisations around to help suicidal people, as well as such kind of course which training people how to deal with suicidal people, how many suicidal people would like to tell others or tell professional counselors to get supports and help from them? I think the professional counselling are very passive, so I wonder how the organisations encourage more suicidal people to ask for help if there only a few people would like to seek for their aids. So this point might be my breakthrough to come up my ideas.

Questions

A suicide prevention example that Mike told me on Thursday has confused me for several days. The case is decades ago in Scotland, the suicide rate reached at the highest peak in the UK, the reason is tons of people utilized coal gas to kill themselves, and this was the most efficient and less painful way to commit suicide --- people will definitely die two minutes after they switched the gas on and put their noses near the drain tap. After finding out this problem, the Scottish Government stopped to use coal gas and began to provide natural gas instead, then during the following years, the suicide rate in Scotland dramatically decreased.

I confused why people didn't choose other ways to end them up? Is it because other ways are more suffering and risky than the coal gas way, so after the most appropriate suicide way were not exist anymore, suicidal people would rather to live than utilizing other ways which may very painful to kill themselves.

Another suspicion is I found a practical guide to teach people how to suicide successfully online, I wonder the existing meaning of such websites. Everyone knows that suicide should be prevented not to be encouraged, but such suicide guide is pushing the suicidal people into a extremely dangerous situation.

It is very exhaustive and made me felt terrible and scary. I believe I am a healthy person without any wrongs in my mind, but if I got such uncomfortable feeling after reading the guide, how about the suicidal people? It is really a bad thing to exist.
http://www.satanservice.org/tokus/suicide/guide/
Be prepared when you decide to read it.

Reflection on Tutorial 17.1.08

By talking with Mike about my ideas, he strongly supported me to do the suicide topic, and I also got some useful suggestions on how to do my initial research in this field.

Mike explained me a chart 'Crime Lifecycle Model' which related to the project he is doing currently. The chart shows 10 influential factors from pre-crime and post-crime aspects. I was quite inspired by the factors which influenced people to commit a crime, such as motives, emotion, life circumstances, skills, knowledge, equipment/tools, and opportunity. I understood that as same as commit a crime, commit a suicide also influenced by these elements. Just say suicide equipment/tools, nowadays people can utilize everything to end them up, so pre-suicide is a potential area which design might be intervene in.

Crime Lifecycle Model

Same as post-suicide, from the chart, one of the factors after crime is 'immediate impact', in suicide case, suicider's families, friends, and people around him/her will suffer great pains as soon as they hear of the terrible news. But in my opinion, research in post-suicide aspects is a little difficult to get approach, so I decided to focus on pre-suicide area to do my research and try to find out in what elements that design can be involved in.

Changing Subject---Suicide

By searching the recent publications on website of The Scottish Government, it's not difficult to identify the main social issues in Scotland. The main problems exists in the topics of Agriculture (such as farming and animal health and welfare); Health, Well-being and Care (such as sexual health); People, Communities and Living (such as suicide, homelessness and sheltered housing) and etc.

I emphasised the suicide topic later because:
a. this is one of the most vital social problems need to be tackled in Scotland even in the world;
b. this is a interesting and challenging topic
c. this topic is accessible to approach because there are enough resources and statistics for me to explore
d. I got an email about a training course of suicide aids from my university, and this email just like a stimulater which enhanced me to make a decision on doing 'suicide' topic at once.

Although not like the food one, I haven't got any ideas on how to do this subject but I booked the training course at once, as circled in red line above, I'm gonna to take the training course on Wednesday 23 01, and I'm I can get great harvest from this training course.