Enacting assemblages of care: How young adults seek support for suicidal ideation

Young adults continue to suffer from high rates of suicidal ideation (SI), attempts, and deaths. How young adults enact help-seeking in their daily lives remains undertheorized. To fill this gap, this study draws from assemblage theory to explore how young adults seek help for SI. Utilizing one-on-one interviews with 39 young American adults conducted from January to July 2024, I draw from assemblage theory to offer a relational understanding of how, in the context of suicide-related help-seeking, diverse elements gather together to construct care. In the first two sections, I examine two phenomena-intimacy and spatiality-that function contingently, flowing through variably scaled assemblages, motivating courses of action, and producing particular affective experiences and relations. In the final section, I explore how these relations prime participants for a practice I call attuned disclosure, in which, given temporary arrangements of particular assemblage elements such as risk logics and technological affordances, young adults calibrate SI disclosure to achieve their desired level of care. This perspective facilitates understanding suicide-related help-seeking not as a set of behaviors but rather as a terrain on which relations between diverse entities, including services, affects, logics, and individuals, are forged and disbanded. In this perspective, help is not sought, but rather, enacted. This focus suggests that, to enhance services for young adults with SI, service providers and broader service systems may benefit from considering help-seeking practices as temporary, emergent, and highly contextual, flowing from subtle impressions and affects, and susceptible to rapid rearrangements.