Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth

by Ian Marsh

• ISBN13: 9780521112543
• ISBN10: 0521112540
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In an original and provocative study of suicide, Ian Marsh examines the historical and cultural forces that have influenced contemporary thought, practices and policy in relation to this serious public health problem. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the book tells the story of how suicide has come to be seen as first and foremost a matter of psychiatric concern. Marsh sets out to challenge the assumptions and certainties embedded in our beliefs, attitudes and practices concerning suicide and the suicidal, and the resulting account unsettles and informs in equal measure. The book will be of particular interest to researchers, professionals and students in psychology, history, sociology and the health sciences.

Author Biography

Ian Marsh is a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. He previously worked in an NHS Community Mental Health Team and continues to facilitate suicide prevention training.

Table of Contents

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