To better understand how austerity kills, this paper draws upon the psychopolitical work of anti-colonial revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s work is important here in two main ways: his insistence on situating ‘symptoms’ of distress within the psychopathology of colonialism itself – the ways colonialism gets under people’s skin (epidermalisation) (Fanon, 1967); and his ‘psychopolitics’ – a denouncement of the colonial practice of using psy-expertise to focus on the brains of the ‘natives’, overlooking the structural conditions of colonialism (Fanon, 1961). Adams says of Fanon (1970:811): ‘the poor are plagued by poverty....Jews by persecution, blacks by exploitation ... Fanon rallied against a “psychologism” that dealt with all of these estranging afflictions as if they were...mere states of mind’. Therefore, not only does Fanon provide us with a language for tracing the psychological impact of colonialism but also for tracing how the psy-disciplines reconfigure this impact as being the result of individual pathologies – what Rimke and Brock (2012) call ‘psychocentrism’. This is not a relic of the past. Razack (2015) powerfully illustrates the individualization, medicalization and pathologisation of oppression evident in the way categories such as alcoholism and ‘mental illness’ are used to obscure colonial and 4 governmental culpability and violence in deaths (including suicides) of indigenous peoples in current-day Canada. Psychopolitics enables a dual analysis of both how austerity kills but also the mechanisms through which economic crisis comes to be rearticulated and reconfigured as individual crisis, including its psychologisation as ‘mental illness’, enabling ‘political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies’ (Berlant, 2007:765) and diverting public discussion of Government culpability to individual level psychological factors. This constitutes, according to Clarke and Newman (2012), the alchemy of austerity – the intense ideological work of reconfiguring profound economic inequalities into individualised problems of ‘welfare dependence’ and ‘cutlures of entitlment’, which mirrors the reconfiguration of economic problems as individual ‘illness’ through psychotherapeutic vocabularies. Reading what the psy-disciplines frame as ‘symptoms’ psychopolitically has long been a strategy of the psychiatric survivor movement (Burstow, LeFrançois, and Diamond, 2014). This approach frames ‘symptoms’ as personally and politically meaningful in that they may constitute ‘rational and resistant reactions to maladaptive environments’ (Goodley, 2001:215), including maladaptive socio-economic politics of austerity. In Fanon’s account colonialism has a violent atmosphere, which ‘here and there bursts out’, a violence ‘which is just under the skin’ (Fanon, 1961:70-71). This is similar to Goodley and Runswick-Cole’s (2011) use of Zizek (2008:1) to analyse the violence of disablism through stepping back from overt violence to ‘perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts’. Similarly, this paper seeks to illuminate the environment from which ‘welfare reform suicides’ represent an escape, addressing the need ‘to structure into our analysis of a person’s death the context of social injustice in which they lived’ (Reynolds, 2016:170). Atmosphere is also key within literature on the psychosocial dynamics of welfare, which are situated within, and yet move beyond, focus on the discursive production of welfare subjectivities to better grasp the affective and embodied experiences of welfare (Stenner, Barnes, and Taylor, 2008) – how welfare practices, and indeed austerity, come to be inscribed on bodies. This literature places ‘emotional life at the heart of social policy and welfare practice whilst retaining a critical perspective on issues of power’ (Frost and Hoggett, 2008:438). There are links here to work within cultural studies on economies and politics of affect (Berlant, 2007; Puar, 2011), austerity as atmosphere (Hitchen, 2016), and questions around how capitalism feels (Cvetkovitch, 2012). Particularly relevant is Berlant’s (2007) ‘slow death’ as an analytical strategy to describe ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people’ (p. 754) under contemporary global/national regimes of capitalist subordination, and the ‘destruction of bodies by capitalism in spaces of production and in the rest of life (p. 764). Puar (2011) draws upon Berlant’s work to ask (in reference to deaths categorized as ‘gay youth suicides’) ‘what kinds of “slow deaths” have been ongoing that a suicide might represent an escape from?’ (2011: 152). Povinelli (2011) in examining modes of making and letting die in late liberalism takes this further by asking who can be 5 seen as accountable for such slow deaths (Povinelli, 2011: 134), and in relation to this paper, for austerity suicides? The psychic life of austerity A psychopolitical analysis is also concerned with subject-making and with psychic life. Conceptualization of ‘psychic life’ has occurred broadly within psychosocial theory where individual psyches are understood as always already social and the social is ‘imbued with the “psychic” life of individuals’ (Froggett, 2012: 179). Much of this work merges Foucauldian thinking (particularly on subjectivity) with concepts from psychoanalytic theories, exemplified in Judith Butler’s (1997) ‘psychic life of power’. A recent example is Fortier’s (2017) work on the ‘psychic life of policy’, which attends to the psychosocial dynamics of UK citizenship policy and the psychic reproduction of hierarchies of belonging through both desire and anxiety. Pre-dating Butler’s work is Nandy’s writing on ‘the psychological contours of colonialism’ and colonial selfhood (1983:2), as well as more recent postcolonial work on the ‘psychic life of colonial power’ (Riggs and Augoustinos, 2005; Hook, 2012). This literature references both the use of the psychological to explore workings of power, but also hints at how the colonial shapes and makes possible psychic life. It emphasizes colonial psychic life as dehumanizing and objectifying because the colonized are cast as instruments of production, or as non-persons that need to be erased (Loomba, 1998/2009). This raises important questions about whether the psychic framing of colonialism and racism transfer to thinking about the psychic life of austerity, especially given the racialized dynamics of austerity that ‘subject certain populations to exploitation, oppression, displacement, and dispossession while conforming to the colorblind optics of official antiracism’ (Thomsen, 2016:1). Useful here is the link traced by Stevenson (2012:597) in thinking welfare colonialism alongside ‘the psychic life of biopolitics’ in relation to the contemporary suicide epidemic among Inuit youth in the Canadian Artic. Stevenson seeks to ‘understand state-sanctioned death and genocide within a political formation that seems to privilege the promotion of life’ (p. 597). Eugenic logic provides a crucial link here between distinct and yet related colonial regimes and rationales for austerity. Eugenics is closely linked to biopolitical discourses of ‘fitness’ (in terms of economic productivity and reproduction) and tied to racism, ableism and sanism, and the multiple ways these are linked to poverty (for example through old yet still present conceptions of degeneracy). The implications of these logics can be seen in the systematic eradication, compulsory sterilization, impoverishment and institutionalization of non-normatively ‘productive’ bodies, disabled and mad people, and indigenous, racialised and colonized peoples. Dependency is central here – in both the creation of economic dependency of colonized states on the metropole (and the disavowal of the dependency of the colonizers on the colonized), and the stigmatization of dependency on the state, for example of those in receipt of disability or unemployment benefits. Eugenic logic is evident in the devaluation of certain forms of life (indigenous, disabled, mad, and poor) and the production of lives that cannot or will not be improved or self-govern (Razack, 2015) as a ‘surplus humanity that is superfluous to a regime of capitalist value’ (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011:1653). This paper argues that the 6 psychological impact of coming to understand oneself as an economic burden can be seen through austerity suicides, and further that these deaths are a logical outcome of eugenic and market logic.

China Mills