"Psychopolitics enables a dual analysis of not only 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 et al., 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''.

"The psychic life of austerity A psychopolitical analysis is also concerned with subject-making and with psychic life. Conceptualisation 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 not only the use of the psychological to explore workings of power, but also hints at how the colonial shapes and makes possible psychic life. It emphasises colonial psychic life as dehumanising and objectifying because the colonised are cast as instruments of production, or as non-persons that need to be erased (Loomba, 2009[1998]). 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 racialised dynamics of austerity that ‘subject certain populations to exploitation, oppression, displacement, and dispossession while conforming to the colorblind optics of official anti-racism’ (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’ (2012: 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 sterilisation, impoverishment and institutionalisation of non-normatively ‘productive’ bodies, disabled and mad people, and indigenous, racialised and colonised peoples. Dependency is central here – in both the creation of economic dependency of colonised states on the metropole (and the disavowal of the dependency of the colonisers on the colonised), and the stigmatisation 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 article argues that the 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