Unspoken, unseen, unheard: using arts-based and visual research methods to gain insights into lived experiences of suicide in young adults

Suicide is often referred to as a silent killer, and the need to break down barriers and build bridges to communication and understanding remains of vital importance. Working within the field of further and higher education for more than 18 years with students experiencing suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviours has highlighted how often deep pain, grief, and trauma go unspoken, unseen, and unheard. Societal and cultural stigma, judgement, misunderstanding, and assumptions remain, all of which silence and can lead to a negative sense of self, others, and a person’s experience of being in the world. This article shows how using arts-based and visual research methods, as part of a mixed methods study, can offer unique insights into the inner world of lived experiences. It draws on analysis of 62 artworks made by 20 students between the ages of 16 and 25 with personal experiences of attempted suicide. These included two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, photography, poetry, and digital art. The research methodology is also discussed, including a 5/6-step approach to the analysis of visual data and data synthesis that has been created to ensure a robust, socially contextualised, and framed analysis. This follows polytextual thematic analysis using a multimodal approach and draws on visual social semiotics. Analysis of visual and arts-based data has revealed aspects of meaning that would otherwise not have been identified. This has led to the development of a model that can help us better understand the cycle of stigma and judgement and how we may be able to break it. This article demonstrates how a creative approach provides a means to share some of the complexity of feelings in a relatable way that has the capacity to bridge the divide between what is hidden and what is seen, bringing this human experience out of the shadows. It aims to honour everyone whose experiences have gone unseen, unspoken, and unheard, as well as the research participants’ wish for their artworks to be shared as a way to challenge the stigma that silences. It further hopes to demonstrate the power of arts-based and visual methods in research whilst also acknowledging some of their limitations so that they can be used more widely with under-represented, marginalised, and silenced voices.

© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).