Abstracts and biographies

Jihadist attacks in France as disguised suicides

Jacques Le Bohec, Université of Lyon 2

This call for papers interested me because I yet dealt with this subject. So it offers the opportunity to gather various texts to communicate about a strong hypothesis: contrary to the common view from journalists, politicians, experts and criminologists, jihadist attacks occurred on the French homeland since 1995 (with Khaled Kelkal in Lyon) may not be mainly motivated by a religious impregnation; they would be more relevantly explained by suicidal tendencies we have to explicit. It seems also too easy to consider them as insane people as an ultimate factor and it is crucial to know why they are troubled if there are.

Obviously many facts go in this way but it is quite impossible to be heard. Actually the public debate in France is saturated by emotions and beliefs; unhappily the distanciation advocated by the socio-historian Norbert Elias is rather rare.

Some protagonists are also ignorant and hesitant towards social sciences, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, for instance, who denounced a so-called « sociological excuse » to jihadists from researchers… It is not a surprise to notice that there are symbolic struggles about the truth but M. Valls tries above all to defend a law-and-order ideology and protect his beliefs.

There are also strategic interests to believe that and to repulse other explanations although more relevant. He and others believe that attacks are caused by fanatism, islamic religion and ties with jihadist organisations settled in Middle East countries.

This struggle has an eminent general interest because it influences the solutions that governments adopt, notably in order to avoid terrible counter-productive effects. It is the reason why actions of « déradicalisation » inside prisons under Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande have clamorously failed and current policy will fail too.

It is incredible to see how governments in fact give what terrorists have never hoped and how they indirectly fuel the phenomenon, which is dangerous for all of us. So to reach an effective outcome it is necessary to mistrust appearances and self-justifications expressed by terrorists themselves, which are basic methodological principles in social sciences…

My speech will also quote a mass murder facially far from religious apparent motivations : the Richard Durn case (he killed himself by defenestration in the police building).

These young men have « dramatized » their suicide in order to

• express publicly their great social malaise

• kill by revenge individuals guilty at their eyes, police or army personals and people who have enough money ant time to enjoy themselves

• be finally killed as « brave heros » by the police or the military

• transcend their terrible socio-biographic impasse by a collective claim

• ridicule the French State unable to protect inhabitants and tourists.

Their goal is to get a maximum media coverage and provoke a very high reaction from the State responsibles.

But why do they do that ? Why do the French (and Belgian) societies produce these desperate young men ? Who are they ? Where were their respective economic and occupational situations ? What were their hopes ? What were their social origins ? Why most of them had their identity documents with them ?! Why were they so attentive to the media coverage ? Why do they know very few about Islam ? Why do they not respect religious rules ? Etc.

The fact that often there come from ghettoised suburbs and immigrated families from the former colonies in Northern Africa does matter.

With all this information we are able to understand why they have chosen to kill themselves like that, their official motivations resembling to a lure, an available and opportunist way to give a superior meaning to their failed individual lives.

Finally we can say that their suicides disguised in terrorist attacks are the logic outcome of a critical situation and structural changes in a country which implements liberal reforms since all least two decades and which helps less and less poor and illiterate people. These young men are so desperate they find a great satisfaction to put the entire society in crisis and in a way they reached their goals.

Suicide during Subsistence Crises: Self-Killing in early modern European Popular Culture

David Lederer, Maynooth University

During the early modern era, popular beliefs held demonic agency accountable for most incidents of self-killing, even in the face of admissible evidence that a self-murderer committed the crime in a non compos mentis state.

In a society still based upon subsistence agriculture, traditional interpretations long detected that numbers of self-killings increased during times of agrarian crises associated with climatic events which destroyed crops, resulting in famine and (as a consequence of lowered resistance to endemic diseases) plague.

Given the stigmas present in Christian theology since St. Augustine, fear of self-killing encouraged the inversion cause and effect, so that the noticeable increase in self-murder could be blamed for catastrophic weather events that lead to subsistence crises. The popular attribution of Satanic temptations to despair as a root cause of hail storms and crop failures became particularly acute during the so-called Little Ice Age.

Remarkably, a similar dynamic has already been demonstrated during the worst periods of witch hunting. In both cases, the insanity defence was gaining ground among early modern state authorities seeking to reign-in popular superstitions. Open confrontation came to a head during suicide revolts, when villagers defended their cemeteries against the interment of self-killers publicly declared non compos mentis.

This interplay between folk belief and natural phenomena underscores the complex influence of environmental factors on mentalities during subsistence crises.

Roundtable: Suicide, Society and Crisis: Implications and Applications for Policy and Practice

Vin Lewin, NHS Mental Health Trust, Sheffield

I am Vin Lewin, I have a degree in nursing studies and a post graduate diploma in Psychosocial Interventions in mental health nursing. I currently work as the lead nurse in clinical risk and clinical investigations at the NHS Mental Health Trust in Sheffield.

My main role is preventing harm to patients and understanding what went wrong when harm occurs. I am a member of the Sheffield city-wide suicide prevention steering group and have recently worked as a part of a small team to develop the internal suicide prevention training. I also represent the Trust at all coroner’s inquests and these are frequently concerned with the suicide of service users.

Suicide prevention continues to be a key national priority for public health and mental health services. People with mental health problems are a particularly high-risk group and it is vital that mental health services continue to strengthen clinical practice if suicides are to be prevented.

Suicide in Sheffield mental health services (predominantly community mental health services) is a common occurrence and in recent years the prevention of suicide has become a priority issue for our organisation and we have sought to try to identify and understand any common features between the people who succeed in ending their life.

We have found that some of the common antecedents to suicide have included

• isolation

• economic adversity

• alcohol and drug misuse

• psychosis and depression

• recent self-harm

• feelings of loss and hopelessness

• feelings of perceived burdensomeness

Our organisations internal narrative data suggests that ‘protective factors’ often hold little value for people who are experiencing suicidal ideation and that often, as clinicians, we seek to identify these factors as a way of reducing perceived risk rather than seeking to understand the person and what their volitional motivators might be.

We have also found that effective communication plays a crucial role in understanding and preventing suicide and our internal training has a strong focus on listening, validation and collaboration.

“Individuals intent on suicide, albeit ambivalently-minded about it, consciously or unconsciously emit signals of distress, indications of helplessness, pleas for response and opportunities for rescue in the usually dyadic interplay that is an integral part of the suicidal drama.” Shneidman, E. Definition of Suicide. New York; Wiley & Sons, 1985.

“To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim.” – Diminishing the focus on individual pathology, amplifying consideration of social issues.

Fiona Malpass, Mental Health activist

In the Western world, the rise of neoliberalism has correspondingly seen a rise in individualism, and a growing emphasis on individual accomplishments and failures that fall in line with neoliberal ideals.

The temptation to situate both success and pathology within individuals, is also reflected within the field of mental health, where distress is often viewed as a deficit in a person, and treatment is thus based on this premise.

Despite a general acknowledgement of the impact of wider social factors on mental health, responses and support for those in mental distress, including those who are suicidal, are focused on the individual. Indeed, distress can often be framed as a failure of the individual’s ‘resilience’ to social and economic stressors, rather than a failing of the social and economic environment the person is situated.

In locating the ‘crisis’ within the individual who is suicidal, and interventions being targeted as such, the need for social or political change is derailed and can be more easily overlooked.

However, there is a growing movement to reposition distress, including suicidal distress, as part of human experience, and not as an individual pathology. Within this perspective, suicidality can be seen as signifying a need for change, and distress can be acknowledged and understood as a representation or reflection of the world the person finds themselves in.

When the assumptions that are made around mental health and suicide are challenged, this creates space to explore suicidality in more nuanced ways, including political, spiritual, social, and philosophical narratives.

Biography

Fiona Malpass is a psychology graduate and mental health activist, who uses her personal experiences to inform her work. She has worked in a variety of mental health settings, including inpatient psychiatric units, and has worked at several mental health charities, including previously managing the Voice Collective Project at Mind in Camden.

She has a strong interest in critical perspectives, and is passionate about exploring diverse narratives and frameworks for understanding and working with distress, beyond current paradigms.

Suicide, Society and the Deployment of ‘Crisis’

Dr Ian Marsh, School of Allied Health Professions, Canterbury Christ Church University

In terms of exploring the relationship between suicide, society and crisis, I am interested in a number of interrelated issues; first, how notions of national, political and social crisis are (or have been) constructed and deployed, by whom and for what reason.

Second, how the relationship between national, political, social crisis on the one hand, and personal crisis on the other, has been conceptualised by different groups (medics, psychologists, historians, sociologists) at different times, for what reason and to what effect.

And finally, whether there are possibilities for rethinking the ways we understand and conceptualise national, political, social and personal crisis, and the relationship between them, from a social justice perspective.

I argue that the use or deployment of ‘crisis’ in relation to suicide is (and has been historically) selective and political. As examples, I look at the large number of ‘excess’ suicides which followed the financial collapse of 2008, as well as the deaths linked to austerity welfare reform.

I also reflect on the current crisis in student mental health and the ways in which that sometimes gets framed as an indicator of a collective lack of ‘resilience’ or ‘grit’ on the part of students (the so-called ‘snowflake generation’), rather than analysed as an outcome of a complex relationship between social structures, hierarchies and moral economies of human worth (both within and outside higher education), ideological-political policy making, and the psychic and emotional life of students caught up in such a regime.

Suicide and healthcare: New words for old ideas

John McGowan, Canterbury Christ Church University

Suicide is an act that has been interpreted in many different ways across time and cultures. Broad historical traditions include the association with criminality and sin but also with heroism and liberty.

The UK Government’s emphasis on suicide prevention shapes many elements of policy. In particular local government and mental health care providers are being encouraged to seek ways to reduce, or even eliminate, suicide entirely. However, there is no evidence that eliminating suicide is possible.

There may also be problematic consequences to premising care on the wish to prevent someone acting in a particular way. As well as the implications for care, such an approach may constrain the ability to think about the broader meaning of suicidal thoughts and acts.

Providing some contrast, physical health care has been an area where ideas of right of an individual to die in the face of physical suffering have gained some traction. In particular the current UK legal position (set out in 2009) provides some recognition of a right to at least seek assistance in the voluntary ending of life.

Across history suicide has often been sees as either a moral wrong or a human right. While we may not talk in such stark terms, these different understandings also appear alive in our contemporary responses to the wish to end our own lives. Understanding the influence of historical contexts has important implications for the responses we give and the care we can provide.

Biography

Dr John McGowan is a Clinical Psychologist and is the Academic Director of the Salomons Clinical Psychology Training Doctorate at Canterbury Christ Church University. Prior to this he worked for a number of years in NHS adult mental health services.

His interests include presentations labelled as ‘personality disorders’, suicide and self-harm, formulation in complex care, the role of psychological practitioners in multi-disciplinary teams and the role of psychological thinking in inpatient environments.

As well as academic researcher, John is a writer and podcaster with also has a strong interest in public engagement. He is the editor of, and a frequent contributor to, the Salomons blog Discursive of Tunbridge Wells. John also contributes to a range of journalistic outlets including: The Guardian, The Conversation and The Health Service Journal.

Ixtab’s path: Suicide, emotions, and mourning in the lives of U.S. women of Mexican descent

Angie Mejia, Syracuse University

Increased interest in suicide by those in sociology point to an urgent need to research meanings attached to suicidality, map trajectories attached to meaning-making along the lines of social stratification and examine specific socio-historical contexts in which these meanings emerge from.

This paper focuses on various Mexican-born and Mexican-American women’s narratives’ around suicidal ideation and attempts and the intersectional contexts from which these meanings emerged.

The findings highlighted here are part of my dissertation research on the lived experience, affective practices, and the various discourses that shape knowledge about emotional health conditions such as depression in the lives of U.S. Latina women.

Using Abrutyn and Miller’s (2014) reconceptualization of Durkheim’s typology of suicide, I analyse participants’ experiences with suicide. I find that the majority of these experiences and meanings around, and recollections of, suicidal thinking, plans or attempts can be categorised as fatalistic-egotistic actions, driven by emotions such as sadness and shame, resulting from the failure of meeting societal expectations and the emotional distress caused by a sense of isolation vis a vis mainstream society OR fatalistic-anomic ones, fuelled by emotions such as anger and rage, stemming from the emotional exhaustion of dealing with societal changes and feelings of resentment due to occupying marginalised social roles and embodying stigmatised identities.

Applying an intersectional analytical approach, showed how respondents’ meanings and interpretations were furthered differentiated when taking into account generational status, language, class background, legal documentation status, level/type/presence of traumatic experiences, and context of social contact with individuals and social groups outside their ethnic communities.

Thus, if melancholic states such as depression create unique subject positions and explain how U.S. Latinas’ embody structural vulnerability and political anxieties, what do suicide attempts, under such affective states, tell us about subjectivities defined by multiple forms of suffering and dispossession?

Biography

Angie Mejia is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at Syracuse University. Her current research encompasses immigration, mental health, ethnicity, bio/psycho-politics, and citizenship by looking specifically at U.S. Latinas’ experiences with depression.

As a critical theorist and public sociologist, she collaborates with other women of colour and share (via performance and public presentations) their experiences of crossing (and surviving) the affective borders constituted by the interaction of neoliberal forces, identities, U.S. cultural practices, and the availability of mental health treatment to minority women. Angie’s work has appeared in Action Research and Theory in Action.

‘What’s in a number, what’s in a name? The politics of statistics in decriminalising suicide in England and Wales’

Chris Millard, University of Sheffield

“Suicide is one of the great brute statistical facts of modern Western Europe, to paraphrase Ian Hacking. Over at least the last two hundred years, suicide has been recorded, tabulated and counted. It forms one of the foundation stones of modern sociology. However, following Hacking, it pays to investigate these seemingly self-evident facts about society when it comes to what is called ‘suicide’.

One interesting way to look at this is to look at the Parliamentary debates around suicide decriminalisation, and the associated government records at the Home Office. A set of numbers, around ‘suicide’ and ‘attempted suicide’ began to circulate, among civil servants, and in Parliamentary questions, that very quickly took on the status of fact about rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Britain.

Upon closer inspection, these numbers were the result of multiple translations, extractions, assumptions and calculations that stand very little scrutiny of their validity. (That is: they do not correspond very well to the phenomena they claim to represent.)

This paper will unpick some of these translations and calculations, not to claim that these numbers are false (although that charge could probably stand), but instead to make a different claim: all numbers are translations and representations – we must be clear about how numbers come about and achieve prominence and credibility if we are to be able to discuss them at all.”

‘Dead people don’t claim’: the psycho-politics of UK welfare reform suicides

China Mills, School of Education, University of Sheffield

One of the symptoms of post financial crisis austerity in the UK has been an increase in the numbers of suicides, especially by people who have experienced welfare reform and conditionality.

This paper develops and utilises an analytic framework of psycho-political autopsy to explore media coverage of suicides linked to welfare reform, or what some call ‘austerity suicides’, and to take seriously the psychic life of austerity and welfare conditionality (shame, anxiety, fear), embedding it in a context of social dis-ease.

Drawing on three distinct yet interrelated areas of literature (the politics of affect and psychosocial dynamics of welfare, post and anti-colonial psycho-politics, and critical suicidology), the paper aims to better understand how welfare reform and conditionality ‘kills’. This approach enables attention to the psychic impact of the stigmatisation of being a recipient of benefits and to the psychic life of welfare conditionality.

It takes seriously the ways that welfare reform suicides are embedded within an affective economy of the anxiety caused by punitive welfare retrenchment, and to how moral economies of human worth are shaped by market logic that assigns value through ‘productivity’ and conceptualises welfare entitlement as economic ‘burden’.

The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from an individual and psychocentric focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide, and thus to provide relevant policy insights about welfare reform.

‘Settler Constructions of Indigenous Suicide and the On-Going Crisis of Canadian Colonialism’

Janet Miron, Trent University, Ontario

Following confederation in 1867, the Canadian state embarked on a concerted and increasingly aggressive effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples, eradicate their cultures, and dispossess them of their rights and land. Settler attitudes towards suicide in Indigenous populations – both its perceived absence and its perceived occurrence – became deeply embedded in and implicated with this broader project of colonisation.

This paper explores settler theories of and responses to Indigenous suicide from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, situating the treatment of suicide as one element of a historic and on-going crisis, that of Canadian colonialism, and furthermore sets this against Indigenous resistance to colonisation.

While tracing the persistence of the trope of a “dying race” in responses to suicide and through a textual analysis of settler representations of suicide and Indigenous peoples from the late nineteenth century and into the second half of the twentieth century, insight can be gained into how discourses of voluntary death were formed to reinforce specific beliefs and theories, in this case those of the Canadian settler state and its settler subjects.

Theories of and responses to suicide would constitute one element in a broader discourse of colonialism that sought to marginalise people from their traditional territories, contain them, and eventually erase their existence, while simultaneously evading acknowledgement of the trauma and dislocation caused by settler society.

Nevertheless, in the face of the profound violence inflicted by settler Canada, Indigenous people never ceased to resist colonialism and insist on their rights, and sought in manifold ways to ensure the healing and well-being of their communities.

Biography

Janet Miron is an associate professor of history at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Currently, she is working on a history of suicide in Canada. An article stemming from this research appears in Histoire sociale/Social History (2014).

She is the co-editor of a special theme issue, “Destabilizing Canada,” for the Journal of Canadian Studies (2017), and her book publications include Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century (2011) and A History of Human Rights in Canada: Essential Issues (2009). She is of mixed French, Irish, metis and Anishinaabe descent (Robinson Huron Treaty Territory).

Public reason out of private perplexity: a comparative view of suicide as societal crisis and individual experience in south India and the UK

David Mosse, SOAS

The question of what explains suicide is never far from that of what suicide explains, as tragic death is attributed a diagnostic capacity for social ills, and from which comes its political force, speaking to the conditions of the victims. And the question of what causes suicide turns to what suicide causes: the individual and societal impacts of, and moral response to, suicide.

These aetiological and social conjunctions are close but also culturally and historically specific; they map the contingencies of individual crises onto societal processes (and vice versa) in distinctive ways.

My paper will consider the relationship between the discursive and statistical framing of suicide, and the particularity of individual experience in two contrasting settings. In one, (southern India) suicide is predominantly regarded as arising from social problems, while in the other (the UK) individual mental illness is emphasised.

But the ‘national crisis’ narrative of suicide in each case reverses the frame: in post-recession UK, social forces of unemployment and deprivation bear down on individuals, whereas in south India’s human development crisis, rising individual aspirations and investments (entrepreneurial or marital) are trapped in social expectations and cultures of honour (caste and gender) that produce shameful failure.

Public narratives of suicide (whether the dangers of deprivation or of aspiration) are bound to be stories we tell ourselves about our societies and their elements, as we frame interpretations of statistics, define who is at risk and in need of care, shape public health interventions, and articulate moral responses; maybe organise street protests, and hold governments to account for trouble in the soul.

But how do the custodians of the memory of their intimates contend with the social types, pre-emptive causal narratives and political meanings read into their private tragedies, and reconcile public claims to knowledge about what, privately, remains unknowable?

Suicide in Slovenia in the 20th century

Meta Remec, Institute of contemporary history, Ljubljana

Suicide is deemed as a part of the Slovenian national character, prone to melancholy and self-destruction. Slovenian suicide rate has increased from three suicides per 100,000 people, quoted in the 1873 statistics, to 33 per year in the last decades of the 20th century.

Despite the potential errors, contained in such statistical reviews, this is nevertheless an increase that has stirred up quite a lot of attention. The analysis will try to follow the suicide trends in view of the various state, political and ideological frameworks as well as periods of war and peace and the influence of Christian and bourgeois morality on the subject.

The presentation will focus primarily on the attitude towards suicide in the socialist mentality that prevailed in Slovenia after World War II and focused, similarly as the bourgeois morality, on the values of responsibility, diligence, moral and spiritual strength, as well as on one’s sacrifice for the community. Hence those who committed suicide were seen as national traitors who had lost their faith in the socialist future.

Special attention will be paid to the crucial period of the 1960s in particular, when a series of suicides committed by the children of the leading Party officials took place in Slovenia. The public was especially shocked that these were mostly well-educated, cultured, and often privileged individuals who thus clearly and declaratively renounced their life in the “socialist heaven” that had been fought for by their fathers during World War II.

Both discourses that appeared in public at that time will be analysed: the dominant opinion that suicide was a senseless act, committed by the spoiled and the cowardly; and the opinion of many intellectuals who claimed that youth suicides in particular were rational and well-considered decisions that represented a particular sort of social criticism of socialism and its repression.

Biography

I have been an Assistant and previously a Young Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana as from 2008 and I achieved my PhD in 2015.

Through my post-graduate study, I have looked into different aspects of everyday life in Slovenia in the bourgeois era, raise of awareness for a healthy lifestyle and hygiene among people and the struggle to fight contagious diseases.

In my previous articles, I focused on the problem of social diseases resulting from poor living and working conditions, tuberculosis in particular, attitude to sexuality, masturbation, sexual diseases and diseases commonly associated to women, but also on the fight against bad habits, such as excessive alcohol and tobacco consumption.

In other articles, I have dealt with the problem of hygiene and sexual diseases among soldiers and with the differences in the way sexual diseases were treated by Slovene authors and their Italian counterparts.

Narrativity and the ‘Suicide Crisis’

Andrew Potter, Independent Scholar

The leading cause of death for men under the age of 45 in the UK is suicide. Commonly referred to in the media as a ‘growing crisis.’ The use of the word crisis implies the problem is endemic and of national concern and many charitable and governmental organisations are set up throughout the UK to deal with it.

The way in which the modern crisis of suicide is described and understood by those who seek to deal with it (charitable and governmental organisations) as well as those who describe it (news media), tells us a great amount about the way in which we, as a society, understand suicide. Each suicide is a story. However, it is a story often told teleologically.

Edouard Levé’s 2008 novel Suicide highlights the importance of suicide in the narrative of one’s life when he writes ‘when you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it.’ However, suicidal narratives are historically contingent.

The omission or reinterpretation of facts in developing a discourse around suicide was highlighted by Ian Marsh in the ‘The Uses of History in the Unmaking of Modern Suicide’ using the example of Forbes Winslow’s reinterpretation of the death of Cato as the act of a lunatic. This contemporary narrativity of suicide is most evidently present when the media discusses the contemporary crisis of suicide.

Words such as ‘lost’ and ‘killer of men’ remove any sense of agency and reduce suicide merely to the symptom of a disease. This paper will seek to uncover a contemporary discourse or ‘regime of truth’ around the way in which we talk about suicide within the context of the suicide crisis of men under 45.

An epidemic of suicide? The numerus clausus law, antisemitism, and student suicide in Hungary in 1920

Judith Szapor, McGill University, Montreal

Genuine, deadly physical violence and rhetoric, moral courage and political expediency met in the journalistic treatment of the “epidemic of suicide” that was reported to be taken hold of Hungarian Jewish youth in the wake of the 1919 counter-revolution and the introduction of the so-called nmerus clausus (NC) law in Hungary.

Act XXV/1920, passed by the Hungarian Parliament in September 1920 had the dubious distinction of being the first antisemitic law of the post-WWI era in Europe.

With the ostensible aim of reducing the overcrowding of Hungarian universities after the Trianon Treaty, the law pegged enrolment to the ratio of “races” and “nationalities” in the general population. However, the anti-Semitic agenda of the new government, the raging white terror directed against Jews in general, and the violence inflicted on Jewish students by right-wing student organisations left no doubt about the law’s anti-Jewish intent.

The law’s quota of 6% for Jewish students drastically reduced the previous, high representation of Jews at university faculties. It also led thousands of Hungarian Jewish students to flee to universities abroad, robbing the country of many future leading lights of Western academia.

Struggling “NC exiles,” however, were the lucky ones – the less well-off or less-adventurous who stayed home to forgo university education altogether were denied of a future in the professions. The law’s breach of the principle of equal citizenship paved the way for the openly discriminatory, anti-Jewish laws enacted in Hungary in the late 1930s and, ultimately, the Hungarian Holocaust.

The weekly of the assimilated Hungarian Jews, Egyenlőség [Equality] took up the cause of the lost generation of Hungarian-Jewish youth, fighting the law and its consequences.

In this paper I will look at the weekly’s reporting on suicide cases within the first year of the law’s introduction. I will attempt to correlate the weekly’s reports with statistical evidence and will pay special attention to language, including euphemisms and code, to illustrate community leaders’ attempt to develop arguments to overturn the law or find accommodation with it.

‘The Seduction of Numbers: Reflections on the History of Suicide, Society and Crisis’

Mathew Thomson, University of Warwick

It is difficult not to be seduced by the numbers when it comes to the history of suicide. At first sight, the figures seem to present the historian of suicide, society and crisis with a series of striking trends that cry out for explanation. Why have the rates of suicide varied between different national settings? Why have rates shifted across time? And when it comes to the issue of crisis, why does it seem that some types of crisis have produced higher rates of suicide than others?

Why, for instance, have the two world wars been associated with a quite dramatic dip in rates in Britain, while periods of economic recessions have seen rates rise? Why also do rates appear to have been so markedly different when we start to differentiate by gender and age?

Focusing in particular on the case study of modern Britain, but making efforts to look beyond that context, this paper outlines these trends and the challenges and opportunities they present for historical research.

It also, however, suggests that we should think critically about this seduction. We need to recognise the ways in which the seduction of numbers may have shaped the phenomenon of suicide at the time. We need to appreciate and work around a series of problems with the accuracy of the numbers. And we need to ask ourselves whether a history that relies on numbers in some respects risks missing the point when it comes to understanding the history of suicide.

Building on this analysis of the seduction of numbers, the paper concludes with some broader reflection on the place of disciplinary boundaries, but also ethics, in the development of a history of suicide, society and crisis.

‘Project Reichenberg: Anomic or altruistic suicide?’

Alexander von Lünen, University of Huddersfield

Hannah Reitsch, renowned aviatrix in Nazi Germany, revealed the “Project Reichenberg” in her autobiography from the 1953. Project Reichenberg was a project deliberated by scientists and engineers in the Air Ministry in Nazi Germany in 1943, proposing to use piloted V1-missiles for Kamikaze-style attacks on Allied targets, such as warships, factories or bridges. Many of those involved authored memos pointing out the altruistic motive to participate in, ie to help Germany survive and mitigate the bombings of German cities.

Beside Project Reichenberg I could find three other proposals for suicide missions, and while Project Reichenberg was never implemented – Nazi leaders and generals, including Hitler himself, rejected the idea, considering Kamikaze tactics “un-German”—these others proposals were used in 1945, albeit in a limited fashion.

Aside from some interesting historiographical issues, in this paper I would like to focus on the aspect what kind of suicidal notion this reflects within Emile Durkheim’s paradigms. While the actors claimed this is an altruistic and heroic act of suicide, the true motivation seems to be more along the lines of what Durkheim called anomic suicide: suicide following a breakdown, or in anticipation of an impending breakdown, of social order.

Christian Goeschel has made a similar argument in relation to suicides by Nazi party officials at the end of the war in the face of the inevitable downfall of Germany; I would, however, go further to argue that ideas such as Project Reichenberg can be characterised as what Durkheim called “egoistic suicide”, a type of suicide that signifies low integration into society (as opposed of Durkheim’s definition of altruistic suicide, which is the result of high social integration).

My paper will include a discussion of recent historic studies on narcissism in Nazi Germany, and a discussion of psychiatrists in the German Luftwaffe.

Biography

I am Senior Lecturer in Modern German History in the History Division at the University of Huddersfield, England. I am teaching British Imperialism, History of Nazi Germany, and Historical Geography of Eastern Europe in the Interwar Years at undergraduate level, and am also on the academic advisory panel of the Holocaust Learning and Heritage Centre that the university is setting up together with the Holocaust Survivor Friendship Association from Leeds.

My PhD (2008) was in History of Science and Technology at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, on aviator equipment in the interwar years in Europe, and I looked into the cooperation between medical researchers and engineers to construct devices, such as pressure suits for high-altitude flight, in it.

I have presented on the history of aviation medicine on several occasions and have some publications in the field, such as ‘Splendid Isolation’? Aviation Medicine in World War II, in Ad Maas and Hans Hooijmaijers, (eds.), Scientific Research in World War II, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 96–108.

Suicide, crisis and cognitive labour in 21st century France

Sarah Waters, University of Leeds

France, during the 2000s, experienced what the international media and experts have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’ in the workplace with unprecedented numbers of workers choosing to kill themselves in the face of extreme pressures of work.

The French case is part of a rising international phenomenon, with an increase in rates of workplace suicide across the globalised economy against a background of profound transformations in work and working conditions.

This paper examines the phenomenon of workplace suicide and asks why, in the present historical juncture, work or conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives.

I focus on a series of high-profile employee suicides at French car manufacturer, Renault for which the company was subsequently held liable. These suicides can be situated in the transition to a post-Fordist economic model characterised by the rise of new forms of cognitive labour in which the mind rather than the physical body has become the critical economic resource.

Suicides affected ‘the cognitariat’ (Moulier Boutang 2011), highly-skilled, well-paid, knowledge workers who put their creative and intellectual faculties at the service of the company.

Contrary to the immaterial labour thesis (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2006) which sees in the shift to creative knowledge work, a liberation from the physical brutalities and disciplinary regimentation of Fordist industrialism, the Renault suicides show that the rise of cognitive labour has generated for some workers, new and intense forms of psychological suffering.

The Renault suicides are an important focus for analysis because they make visible and push to the surface, forms of material suffering in an economic order in which they are often fetishistically denied.

Biography

Sarah Waters is Professor of French Studies at the University of Leeds. She is Personal Investigator on an AHRC fellowship that examines workplace suicides in France.

Race Suicide in the United States, 1900-1914

Kevin Yuill, University of Sunderland

Dr S. A. K. Strahan, in a book published in Boston in 1894, noted that suicide was “a sign of the degeneration of the human species, brought about by the deteriorating influences of civilization…”[1] Several years later, sociologist Edward A. Ross, heavily influenced by Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, coined the term “race suicide”.

The white race was dying out not by the actions of another race but, as Ross said, ‘‘the higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off from itself by collective action.’’

As historian Thomas Dyer has observed, few social science theories gripped the Western imagination more completely at the turn of the twentieth century than the idea of race suicide. Theodore Roosevelt and many others warned of its perils.

This paper will examine the background of anxieties expressed by concern about race suicide, whether the content of the term changed as awareness of race grew in the early 1900s. Additionally, did awareness of suicide impact on the way suicide was understood at the time?

[1] The article was reprinted along with several rebuttals and a reply in Robert G. Ingersoll et al, Is Suicide a Sin? (New York: Standard Publishing Company, 1894). Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton University Press, 1988), 111. Cited in Review of Suicide and its Sources; Suicide and Insanity, A Physiological and Sociological study by S.A.K. Strahan, M.D. New-York: Macmillan & Co., New York Times, January 14, 1894.

Biography

Kevin Yuill is Programme Leader for History at the University of Sunderland. He is currently preparing a monograph on the 1924 Immigration Act and the establishment of racial identity in the United States. He has published Firearms and Freedom: The Second Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization (2013), and ‘The Spectre of Japan: The Influence of Foreign Relations on US Race Relations Theory, 1905-1924’, Patterns of Prejudice (2015).