From Tragic Life to Tragic Death: Negotiating the Emotions of Suicide in Finnish Youth Press, 1967–89

Abstract The meaning of suicide in any given community reveals attitudes about its acceptability, which might influence its occurrence. This article explores young people’s understanding of suicide during a time of high but fluctuating suicide rates in Finland in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing from the history of emotions and treating suicidality as a feeling, this article shows how suicidal feelings were embraced and limited. I argue that during these two decades, young people went from viewing youth suicide and suicidality as pitiable yet ultimately understandable phenomena to seeing suicides as highly sentimental, exceptional tragedies. By analyzing young people’s writings in youth media, this article focuses on the age group in which suicide rates rose rapidly in the 1970s and remained high in the 1980s. It proposes another viewpoint on explaining suicidality by examining the processes through which suicidal feelings were adopted, challenged, and restricted.