Mills

"Focusing here on worry and anxiety enables a move beyond solely a discursive analysis to explore how austerity is inscribed on bodies - embodied and lived. The inscription of worry9 onto bodies is evident in the death of Elaine Christian, who was ‘found dead in a drain [and] had been worried about attending a medical appointment to assess disability benefits’ (Hull Daily Mail). The inquest heard that Elaine, who died from drowning and whose wrists were covered in self-inflicted cuts, ‘had been worrying about a meeting she was due to have to discuss her entitlement to disability benefits’ (Hull Daily Mail). From a psychopolitical frame of analysis, Elaine’s worry is made flesh as the toxicity of austerity gets under, and is marked upon, her skin. For Fanon, this is a process of epidermalisation, where anxiety and inferiority, as a product of hierarchies, is made flesh and lived through the body (Fanon, 1967:11). Elaine’s death then seems marked by worry linked to ‘entitlement’ to benefits, which is itself structured by hierarchies and moral economies of ‘worthiness’ that come to be internalized – what might be understood as the epidermalisation of austerity and stigmatization.''

"This article develops and utilises an analytic framework of psychopolitical autopsy to trace suicide as one of the symptoms of austerity and welfare reform. This brings together analytical tools rarely used alongside each other – research into the politics and economies of affect, post and anti-colonial psychopolitics and critical suicidology (one notable exception to this is Hunter 2015). This enables a timely analysis that takes seriously the psychic life of austerity (internalisation, shame, anxiety), embeds ‘psychic distress in a context of social dis-ease’ (Orr, 2006: 29), avoids understanding suicide solely through a psychocentric register (Rimke and Brock, 2012), and ultimately aims to attempt to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from a solely individual focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide – how welfare ‘practices’ can kill and can come to feel like murder (Stevenson).

"Three key findings emerge from this work: (a) that newspaper coverage tends to report individual cases of suicide without making links to the wider pattern of such deaths; (b) that the mobilisation of mental health problems in much newspaper coverage works to configure suicide as a response to mental illness (even where mental illness is acknowledged to be linked to austerity); and (c) wider stigmatisation of welfare claimants (and ‘dependency’ more broadly) is a key element of the psychic life of austerity. In doing this the article first foregrounds analytical concepts of psychopolitics and autopsy. It moves on to trace newspaper portrayals of trajectories of causality for austerity suicides, and compares psychocentric mobilisations of mental health with austerity’s ‘nervous conditions’ and the internalisation of eugenic and market logic. Finally, the article turns to examine what a psychopolitical analysis means for understanding government culpability and activism''.

"This article draws upon and is situated within the field of Critical Suicidology, which aims to conceptualise acts of self-killing beyond narrow medical and psychological approaches that frame suicide as an outcome of individual pathology (White et al., 2016). This problematises ‘taken-for-granted ideas that any death named suicide happens in apolitical contexts’ (Reynolds, 2016: 169). This is particularly evident in what Marsh calls the ‘compulsory ontology of [the] pathology’ of suicide – the dominance of an ‘individualized, “internalized”, pathologised, depoliticized, and ultimately tragic form of suicide [that] has come to be produced, with alternative interpretations of acts of self-accomplished death marginalised or foreclosed’ (2010: 43 and 219). The dominant conception of suicide as an outcome of ‘mental illness’ that has become normatively monolithic in the global North, means that suicide prevention based on treatment of ‘mental illness’ has become common-sense (Battin, 2005). This means that alternative framings of suicide as contextualised, as historically and culturally contingent, or as a method of resistance, are subjugated and silenced (Marsh, 2010). Even the act of naming certain kinds of death as ‘suicide’ is seen to mask ‘daily conditions of suffering and immiserisation’ and to normalise ‘social contexts marked by stigma, exclusion and hate’, preventing us from understanding how indifference and hate ‘kills’ (Reynolds).''

China Mills