Table of Contents
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xi
Part I Introduction and analytic strategy 1
1 Introduction 3
Foucault, critique and the study of suicide 3
Rationale 5
Plan of the book 8
2 Analytic strategy 13
Introduction 13
Principles of analysis 14
Analytic strategies 16
Questions addressed in the book 23
Part II The present 25
3 Mapping a contemporary 'regime of truth' in relation to suicide 27
Introduction 27
Producing and reproducing truths in relation to suicide: a compulsory ontology of pathology in professional accounts of suicide 28
Overview: suicide as pathological and a matter of psychiatric concern 29
Constructing a compulsory ontology of pathology in relation to suicide 31
Achieving authority within texts 33
Construction of concepts, objects and subjects 36
Disseminating truths in relation to suicide: a compulsory ontology of pathology in media accounts of suicide 43
Media guidelines on the reporting of suicide 45
'Truth effects' 51
Suicide prevention 62
Conclusions 64
4 Problematising a contemporary 'regime of truth' in relation to suicide 65
Problematising contemporary discursive formations of suicide 65
Conclusions 75
Part III A history of the present 77
Introduction to Part III 77
5 Self-accomplished deaths at other times and in other places: the contingency of contemporary truths in relation to suicide 79
Descriptions of self-accomplished deaths in ancient Greece and Rome 79
Romana mors: self-accomplished death as relational, philosophical and political 80
Self-accomplished death as a sin and a crime 86
Conclusions 89
6 Conditions of possibility for the formation of medical truths of suicide: 1641-1821 90
Introduction 90
Inventing suicide 90
The secularisation of suicide in early modern England 92
Non compos mentis: suicide and insanity 93
Alienism, and the asylum as laboratory for the production of medical truths 94
Accounting for the shift from punishment to confinement and treatment: a new 'economy' of power? 96
Conclusions 99
7 Suicide as internal, pathological and medical: Esquirol 1821 100
Introduction 100
'Pathologie interne' 100
The passions 103
'Suicide provoked by the passions' 107
Conclusions 111
8 The production, dissemination and circulation of medical truths in relation to suicide: 1821-1900 115
Introduction 115
Defining suicide by reference to insanity: what sort of madness was suicide? 116
Suicide as a morbid action of the body, the result of pathological anatomy 117
Reading the signs written on the body 122
Suicide arising from an internal, irresistible impulse: possession, perversion and impulsion 124
Defining insanity by reference to suicide: what suicide revealed of madness 132
Defining psychiatry by reference to suicide: what suicide tells us of the function of psychiatry 135
Subject formation 143
The changing nature of the suicidal subject 149
Responsibility, accountability and culpability in preventing suicide 150
9 Managing the problem of the suicidal patient: containment, constant watching and restraint 156
Asylum practices 156
Asylum suicides 159
Conclusions 166
10 Towards the 'normatively monolithic' - 'psy' discourse and suicide: 1897-1981 168
The challenge to, and later reassertion of, psychiatric dominance in relation to suicide 168
Extending the possibilities for the 'pathologisation' of suicide 173
Psychoanalytic constructions of the suicidal subject 174
Challenging psychiatric dominance 181
Sociological discourse on suicide 182
Thomas Szasz on suicide 184
Reasserting psychiatric dominance 187
Demarcating the normal and pathological in relation to suicide: psychological autopsy, St Louis, 1959 and 1981 187
Conclusions 191
11 The discursive formation of the suicidal subject: Sarah Kane and 4.48 Psychosis, 2000 193
Introduction 193
Suicidal subjectivities and first-person accounts 194
Sarah Kane, suicide and 4.48 Psychosis 195
4.48 Psychosis as constituted by 'pathological' discourses on suicide 197
4.48 Psychosis as a critique of, and resistance to, psychiatric discourse and practices 202
4.48 Psychosis as subverting foundational psychiatric assumptions of the self and suicide 208
Witnessing a private act 210
Conclusions 213
Part IV Summary and conclusions 217
12 Summary and conclusions 219
Summary of arguments and findings 219
Conclusions 223
References 231
Index 248
