When Psychology Fails: Suicide Prevention, Religious Authority, and the Making of National Policy in Indonesia

When Psychology Fails: Suicide Prevention, Religious Authority, and the Making of National Policy in Indonesia Sandersan Onie, Lynch Family Foundation Research Fellow in Global Health Equity, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Moderator: Byron Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Social Anthropology Program, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Indonesia has had mental health and disability legislation on its books since the 1960s. For six decades, these laws have remained largely unimplemented. As a psychologist with policy experience, I reflected on what was missing, and why I needed to go beyond what I understood to answer it. Rather than treating this as a simple failure of political will, I ask the question: why does a state legislate care it does not deliver, and what does suicide prevention mean in the space that gap leaves behind? In a Muslim-majority archipelago of almost 290 million people, where distress is spoken in religious and communal idioms and the health system reaches some citizens and not others, suicide is governed as much by clerics, families, and communities as by clinicians or the state. In this talk, I reflect on a decade of work in Indonesia and other low-resource settings — Indonesia's first national suicide situation analysis, the drafting of its national prevention strategy, collaborations with Islamic and Christian religious leaders, and efforts to expand psychological support through task-sharing and digital tools. I come to this work as a psychologist, trained in an evidence base built far from the worlds where most suicide occurs, and I treat that training not as a toolkit to be applied but as one voice in a negotiation. I ask who is authorized to speak about suicide, what our categories illuminate and obscure, and what it means to build national policy in the space between competing claims on suffering. Suicide prevention, I will argue, is never only a clinical project. It is a project of meaning-making, and the communities we serve are its co-authors, not its recipients.