Historical phenomenology: understanding experiences of suicide and suicidality across time

Different cultures at different moments in history have constructed suicide differently. That seems an obvious statement, and any book which offers up a history of the topic confirms the fact. For Ian Hacking, ``the meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide'' (Crit Inq 35:1, 2008), and it is not so hard to agree that meanings, descriptions and representations change, but beyond these, are there non-contingent (ahistorical and acultural) features of suicide? Is there perhaps an unchanging experience of suicidality? Many modern theories implicitly suggest there is (e.g. Edwin Shneidman's notion of psychache and Thomas Joiner's constructs of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness can be read as attempts to describe underlying universals in the experience of suicide).