Storytelling, Facts, and Epigenetic Sensibilities: From Critique to Speculation

This chapter centres on an interview with two people who recount their parents’ lives and deaths by suicide following the donation of their parents’ neural tissues to neuroscientific research. Their accounts of biological risk, vulnerability, and shocking yet perhaps ultimately unsurprising deaths can be interpreted as expressions, if ambivalent, of neuroepigenetic sensibilities. These sensibilities, shaped by popular neuroscience and participation in research, do not merely reflect neuroepigenetic models, they actively inform them through research processes. The bereaved’s stories of the deceased contribute to tissue classification for subsequent neuroepigenetic analysis, converting complex lives into stabilised facts that reinforce specific narratives of suicide. The interview is part of longitudinal ethnographic research conducted since 2013 with a multidisciplinary neuroscience group studying suicide. This research includes over 120 interviews with researchers, clinicians, trainees, and people living with chronic suicidality. To consider the relative insights that biomarkers and life stories offer into people’s lives and deaths, and the limits of these insights, I introduce speculative accounts of limitless access to biomarker data points. This approach critically assesses possible futures for neuroepigenetics research and proposes the potential value of reconsidering knowledge production. Specifically, loosening the tendency toward singular narrative control, whether based on biomarkers or stories, in explaining suicide might lead to greater understandings of suicidality and address ambivalence associated with contemporary neuroepigenetic sensibilities.