Psychopolitics of austerity suicides
China Mills’ work on the psychopolitics of suicides linked to welfare reform and austerity researches the the psychic life of ‘austerity suicides’, aiming to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. Analysing media coverage of ‘austerity suicides’, this research found that welfare reform suicides are linked to the anxiety caused by punitive welfare retrenchment, including constructing welfare entitlement as an economic ‘burden’. The pervasiveness of this market logic shapes moral economies of human worth and assigns value through ‘productivity’, potentially leading people to feel their lives are of no value. The psychopolitics that China is developing and using in her research, draws upon postcolonial scholarship and activism, particularly the work of Frantz Fanon. Instead of always assuming that suicide is the result of individual psychological issues, the approach tries to find a way to illuminate the role played by government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide, thus providing relevant policy insights about welfare reform.
China will also be presenting this work at a few events this year, including at York University’s “Mind Your Head” Mental Illness Awareness Week, on February 14th 2018.
This research has also been presented at various events and conferences including: Fracturing Societies in July 2016, organized by Professor Rowland Atkinson; The British Sociological Association’s annual conference, Manchester April 2017; and the University of Canterbury’s second Critical Suicidology conference, in July 2017. To watch a film of the presentation in Canterbury, please see below:
The research has been published as a journal paper in Critical Social Policy: Mills, C. (2017). ‘Dead people don’t claim’: a psychopolitical autopsy of UK austerity suicides. Critical Social Policy, see http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261018317726263
And as a blog piece for Discover Society:
Dr China Mills
