When suicide language travels

Translating suicide-related terminology reveals how psychiatric language carries moral, historical and cultural meanings that shape clinical practice and public understanding. While translating a recent book written in an earlier psychiatric idiom, I encountered tensions between fidelity to the author’s generational discourse and contemporary efforts to reduce stigma. Examples from Taiwan show how translation choices also interact with family ethics, professional guidance, media practice and public policy. Translation therefore acts as a form of care and a site at which the politics of psychiatric knowledge become visible.