Suicide Beyond the Individual: Collective Narratives in Rural Spanish Communities

A new study published in the journal Social Sciences explores how, in rural contexts in Spain, suicide is understood and transmitted through narratives shared within the community.

The study, entitled “Dead in Life: Narratives About Circumstances Prior to Suicide in Rural Western Spain,” approaches suicide through an ethnographic study conducted in a rural locality in Extremadura. The research involved more than six months of fieldwork and 56 interviews, which gathered community narratives about suicides that occurred between 1922 and 2023. The study was carried out by specialists in social anthropology and psychology from the UNED and the University of Extremadura.

The findings reveal the existence of four major thematic blocks that recur repeatedly in the accounts of local residents: trance as a transition or connection to death, the appearance of disconnection from life, the possibility of resurrection, and premonitory apparitions. These axes reflect shared ways of interpreting and narrating suicide within the community, each unfolding into different nuances and examples drawn from stories transmitted over time.

These four axes do not aim to explain suicide from a clinical or individual perspective, but rather to show how it is understood as a process lived and narrated collectively. The interviews reflect shared suffering and beliefs, illustrating how the community seeks to make sense of a death that is particularly difficult to accept. In rural contexts, where social ties are close and stigma is often stronger, these narratives are intensified and turn suicide into a lasting mark on collective memory.

These findings help to understand how communities experience and elaborate suicide and grief not only as an individual experience, but as a profoundly collective phenomenon, constructed and transmitted through shared narratives, beliefs, and common memories. Understanding suicide from this community-based perspective allows us to broaden the focus beyond the individual and is key to designing prevention and support strategies that are more sensitive to the cultural, social, and relational context of rural areas in Spain.

Reference original work: López-Lago Ortiz, L., Mariano Juárez, L., & López García, J. (2025). Dead in Life: Narratives About Circumstances Prior to Suicide in Rural Western Spain. Social Sciences, 14(2), 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14020069