Human rights-based approaches to suicide have gained global traction after the United Nations’ 2019 call for suicide prevention as an obligation of human rights. These approaches shift from viewing suicide as an individual problem to one rooted in socio-political conditions and societal injustice. In the UK, Scotland is notoriously progressive in its national suicide prevention strategies, championing human rights-based approaches that centre trauma-informed care, multi-sectoral engagement, and lived/living experience. The Scottish Government's Time Space Compassion approach is the country's most recent suicide response strategy. While Time Space Compassion maintains progressive intentions, normative and pathological assumptions permeate its representations of suicide and suicidality. This article utilises ‘queering’ as a methodological tool to challenge the approach's normalised ideals of suicidal time, space, and compassion and argue for a queering of the desire to die that mobilises structural change and capacitates more liveable futures.
Ruth A. Chartoff (Mon,) studied this question.