Responding to suicide

Scott Fitzpatrick (2016) covers the terrain spanning suicide prevention efforts and survivor narratives. He sets up a binary with one pole as biomedical perspectives on suicide, immediately judged as inadequate, and then seeks to examine at the opposite pole, the texture, history, and policy drivers of the current turn toward survivor narratives. He argues that privileging one specific type of recovery narrative, that is, self-(re) formation, aligns the discourse of suicide narratives to an overall liberal policy orientation of suicide prevention and corrupts the integrity and complexity of the survivor’s struggle.

I would like to respond to the essay in two somewhat different registers.

The Aporia of an Ethics of Sicidology

I agree with Fitzpatrick that there is a problem with the ethics of a suicidology that elicits and encourages only those narratives that meet a specific norm of storytelling, that is, of courage, recovery, and self-reconstruction. It is certainly important, as he argues, to maintain the integrity of the narrative and the struggle it enacts in how the survivor comes to terms with the raw intensity of the experience, and the path she takes to a social life. Yet, the latter, too, is an ethical position that correctly gives primacy to the survivor’s account. The aporia, or practical impasse, of such an ethical position or judgment is that it forecloses an investigation of what suicide as a social act is trying to say. I would suggest that there is a symbolic, even symptomatic, dimension to suicide that needs to be understood in its complex historicity. I use some examples from a different sociocultural context, India, and my own engagements with some of the discourses, to tease out this point.

My first example of a discourse surrounding suicide is that around the Mental Health Bill pending enactment in the Indian Parliament (as of 2016), which has a clause that proposes decriminalizing suicide (suicide is a crime in India, although survivors are rarely pursued by the law) and, with the best of intentions, proposes treating all attempted suicides as problems of mental ‘illness’ and giving survivors immediate psychiatric assistance. Criticizing this proposal, mental health and civil rights activists argued that although decriminalizing suicide was good and in line with humane international legal developments, treating a suicide survivor as a person suffering mental illness is fraught with the risk of life-long legal, social, and medicolegal discrimination (Davar et al., 2013). In fact, in India, the potentially more serious crime is of abetment to suicide, which is often a convenient name for familial and other forms of institutionalized murder in a changing and stressed society. Most immediately, treating a survivor as a mentally ill person would not permit the prosecution to use the account of the survivor (who is presumed ‘mentally ill’) to prove its case against the abettors. This discourse and its setting are indicative of the developmental forces that the law is designed to exert on ‘traditional communities,’ aimed at individualizing their members and socializing them into modern ethicolegal conduct.

In another example, when a student from a Dalit community (systematically discriminated against in the caste hierarchy in India) committed suicide in 2013 in a prestigious university, the authorities tried to bring quick closure to the tragic event with a story of a failed love affair leading to depression and the taking of a life (Solidarity Committee of University Students, 2013). In immediate opposition, Dalit students’ unions told the story of persistent discrimination by the university administration as the chronic ground for his existential fatigue and the decision to end his life. What is telling is that the student, who was described posthumously as an ordinary quiet individual, became in death the powerful icon of the oppressed, and the act of mourning that death publicly reclaimed him as a symbol of protest against the social discrimination faced by the whole community. In other words, the memory of the person who committed suicide played a greater and richer social role than that he did in life.

In my third example, the Christian Medical College in Vellore (Tamil Nadu) has to deal with...