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Paper short abstract

how does an otherwise violent institution enact care for families bereaved by suicides? the involvement of police in suicide prevention programmes presents a fruitful ground to explore the mutually constitutive nature of care and violence within mental health infrastructure in Tharparkar, Pakistan.

Paper long abstract

The discovery of coal reserves and its subsequent extraction through China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in the last decade transformed the socioeconomic and ecological landscape of Tharparkar, Pakistan’s largest and arguably the poorest district. During the same time, the news of alarmingly high number of suicides, largely among young Hindu women from scheduled castes, have created cause for concern among various public and private health actors on local and regional levels. This concern has led to a series of mental health interventions aimed towards Tharri people. These interventions together form a makeshift health infrastructure, where actors improvise providing care in absence of sufficient funding and support from the state.

In this paper, I focus on one actor within this infrastructure, the local police, and examine two aspects of their involvement in suicide prevention in Tharparkar: the bureaucratic process of producing evidence of a suicide ‘crisis’ and managing ‘anti-suicide cells’ in local police stations. While policing in Pakistan is associated with physical violence and brutality, Tharparkar police officials see themselves as agents of care. Through fieldwork carried out over 14 months in Tharparkar and neighbouring cities, I demonstrate how police officials understand their work as caregivers for bereaved families. Doing so, I argue that, through relying on intuition and embodied cultural norms, the police involvement in suicide prevention enacts forms of structural violence (Gupta 2014) that they nevertheless understand as acts of care. The paper illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of violence and care in mental health work in South Asia.