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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic data, this paper seeks to challenge public health approaches to suicide prevention and intervention.

Paper long abstract:

Suicide, one of the leading causes of death in the world, has been framed as an urgent public health issue. Through exclusively employing biomedical research, suicide has been internalised as a product of individual pathology, justifying the use of hospitals, medical professionals, Crisis And Treatment Teams (CATT), and even the police in public health intervention and prevention programs, with little, if any, focus on the social or spiritual needs of suicidal individuals. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic data, this paper seeks to challenge the hegemonic public health approach to suicide prevention and intervention. By contrast, ethnographic anthropological research portrays suicide as a social act driven by political, economic, historical, and cultural factors. The neoliberal mode of state governance, in particular, has been argued as a potent driving force of suicidal ideation and behaviours. Therefore, I argue, the biomedical myopia within public health discourse on suicide is an inevitable product of public health's embeddedness with the neoliberal mode of state governance. Public health is positioned as a politicised institution that acts to support neoliberal policies through depoliticising and decontextualizing the negative implications of these policies on lives of people across the world, acting to exacerbate the weight of structural violence on populations. Thus, I contend that suicide must be separated from the public health approach to allow for more effective prevention and intervention efforts to be conceptualised. This will require further ethnographic research to be conducted to understand the structural factors that drive suicide in Australia.