The project
Suffering with Suicide: Revisioning distress and suicidality in women nurses
Across our five studies we will be implementing new ways of thinking to help us understand what contributes to personal suffering, distress and suicidality for diverse populations of women nurses. We will be exploring forms of workplace injustices and inequality, and how they operate and affect each other, using a feminist and intersectional approach. As we learn, we will be sharing our knowledge with health sector leaders and policy makers, so that future research and preventative work can incorporate our findings.
Research questions
We will be asking:
a) How are distress, suicidality and suicide prevention in nurses positioned and constructed in research and policy and with what political, social and personal consequences?
b) What are the key philosophical and methodological gaps in the literature and how can we use this knowledge to shape future research and inform suicide prevention policies?
c) What different narratives exist around nursing distress and suicidality among policymakers, employers, nurses and the public?
What are patients’, carers’ and the public’s understandings of contexts impacting nurses’ distress-suicidality and what role, if any, can they play in mitigating nurses’ suffering?
What experiences and contexts contribute to feelings of individual suffering, distress and suicidality among nurses, taking account of intergenerational and transcultural experiences and perspectives among an ethnically diverse population of nurses?
What contribution can the use of novel and innovative qualitative methods (e.g., storytelling) make toward revisioning our understanding of this topic?
Outcomes
We are aiming to:
Identify and characterise critical policy-research gaps and current discourses, and their political, social and personal consequences.
Illuminate and legitimise nurses’ voices and experiences which are historically unvoiced and unrepresented in the production of knowledge on distress and suicidality in the nursing population.
Identify and characterise relevant contexts (e.g. occupational, ethical, social, political, biographical, cultural, economic, political, colonial and historical) and their relationship to psychological distress and suicidality in the nursing community.
Identify public (including families and friends of nurses) perspectives on contexts that impact distress and nurse suicidality to develop socially engaged allyship models of support.
Elucidate the value of using novel, creative methods to explore this topic with this population.
Ethics
We are in the process of applying for ethical approval for all studies from University of Surrey School of Health Science Ethics Committee.
Funding
We are grateful for the support of the Wellcome Trust who have funded this project.
