Young adults in the United States (U.S.) suffer from suicidal ideation and attempts at persistently high rates. Many young adults do not seek help of any kind for suicidal ideation. Among support available for those with suicidal ideation, young adults are increasingly turning to crisis text services for suicidal ideation support. Given this, our understanding of how young adults seek support for suicidal ideation and navigate resources, including crisis text services, is crucial.
Drawing from a web-based survey and interviews, I explore the structural, institutional, social, and relational engagement that gives shape to young adults’ suicide-related help-seeking practices. I begin by drawing from survey data to develop a quantitative understanding of those who use crisis text services relative to other resources. Using descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and content analysis, I describe characteristics associated with crisis text service use and barriers to using this source of support. Further, I explore participant recommendations for the improvement of crisis text services.
Following this, I draw from 39 in-depth interviews with young American adults aged 18-25. First, I analyze participants’ social lives, emphasizing how their daily living and priorities outside of medical systems influence and shape their conduct within them. I utilize life course theory to examine how the emergent adulthood stage of the life course shapes help-seeking practices, exploring how their self-development, shifting relationships and spatial ties, and increasing sense of self intersect with help-seeking practices. I highlight how suicide-related help-seeking practices are shaped less by age than by the social expectations and constraints embedded in the emergent adulthood life course stage.
Finally, I bridge assemblage theory with the sociology of help-seeking to construct a relational understanding of participants’ subjective suicide care assemblages. I focus on how young adults envision and enact care, arguing that ideas and affects flow through suicide care assemblages to impact help-seeking processes in meaningful ways. Specifically, I trace how intimacy and spatiality flow through the assemblage, represent assemblage ideals, and produce particular affective experiences, revealing the care system's interconnected nature. I also illustrate how young adults adopt in response to these interconnections, showing how young adults calibrate suicidal ideation disclosures within care technologies to resist governing assemblage ideals. The assemblage perspective facilitates understanding suicide-related help-seeking as a series of temporarily arranged relations between diverse entities, including services, affects, ideas, and individuals envisioned and enacted by those who consider help and sometimes seek it.
Taken together, these findings suggest a relational and processual view of suicide-related help-seeking—one that shifts focus from individuals’ attitudes toward isolated services to the pursuit of specific affective connections with people, services, technologies, and ideas, all shaped by one’s position within the life course.
