| List of figures | p. x |
| Acknowledgements | p. xi |
| Introduction and analytic strategy | p. 1 |
| Introduction | p. 3 |
| Foucault, critique and the study of suicide | p. 3 |
| Rationale | p. 5 |
| Plan of the book | p. 8 |
| Analytic strategy | p. 13 |
| Introduction | p. 13 |
| Principles of analysis | p. 14 |
| Analytic strategies | p. 16 |
| Questions addressed in the book | p. 23 |
| The present | p. 25 |
| Mapping a contemporary 'regime of truth' in relation to suicide | p. 27 |
| Introduction | p. 27 |
| Producing and reproducing truths in relation to suicide: a compulsory ontology of pathology in professional accounts of suicide | p. 28 |
| Overview: suicide as pathological and a matter of psychiatric concern | p. 29 |
| Constructing a compulsory ontology of pathology in relation to suicide | p. 31 |
| Achieving authority within texts | p. 33 |
| Construction of concepts, objects and subjects | p. 36 |
| Disseminating truths in relation to suicide: a compulsory ontology of pathology in media accounts of suicide | p. 43 |
| Media guidelines on the reporting of suicide | p. 45 |
| 'Truth effects' | p. 51 |
| Suicide prevention | p. 62 |
| Conclusions | p. 64 |
| Problematising a contemporary 'regime of truth' in relation to suicide | p. 65 |
| Problematising contemporary discursive formations of suicide | p. 65 |
| Conclusions | p. 75 |
| A history of the present | p. 77 |
| Introduction to Part III | p. 77 |
| Self-accomplished deaths at other times and in other places: the contingency of contemporary truths in relation to suicide | p. 79 |
| Descriptions of self-accomplished deaths in ancient Greece and Rome | p. 79 |
| Romana mors: self-accomplished death as relational, philosophical and political | p. 80 |
| Self-accomplished death as a sin and a crime | p. 86 |
| Conclusions | p. 89 |
| Conditions of possibility for the formation of medical truths of suicide: 1641-1821 | p. 90 |
| Introduction | p. 90 |
| Inventing suicide | p. 90 |
| The secularisation of suicide in early modern England | p. 92 |
| Non compos mentis: suicide and insanity | p. 93 |
| Alienism, and the asylum as laboratory for the production of medical truths | p. 94 |
| Accounting for the shift from punishment to confinement and treatment: a new 'economy' of power? | p. 96 |
| Conclusions | p. 99 |
| Suicide as internal, pathological and medical: Esquirol 1821 | p. 100 |
| Introduction | p. 100 |
| 'Pathologie interne' | p. 100 |
| The passions | p. 103 |
| 'Suicide provoked by the passions' | p. 107 |
| Conclusions | p. 111 |
| The production, dissemination and circulation of medical truths in relation to suicide: 1821-1900 | p. 115 |
| Introduction | p. 115 |
| Defining suicide by reference to insanity: what sort of madness was suicide? | p. 116 |
| Suicide as a morbid action of the body, the result of pathological anatomy | p. 117 |
| Reading the signs written on the body | p. 122 |
| Suicide arising from an internal, irresistible impulse: possession, perversion and impulsion | p. 124 |
| Defining insanity by reference to suicide: what suicide revealed of madness | p. 132 |
| Defining psychiatry by reference to suicide: what suicide tells us of the function of psychiatry | p. 135 |
| Subject formation | p. 143 |
| The changing nature of the suicidal subject | p. 149 |
| Responsibility, accountability and culpability in preventing suicide | p. 150 |
| Managing the problem of the suicidal patient: containment, constant watching and restraint | p. 156 |
| Asylum practices | p. 156 |
| Asylum suicides | p. 159 |
| Conclusions | p. 166 |
| Towards the 'normatively monolithic' - 'psy' discourse and suicide: 1897-1981 | p. 168 |
| The challenge to, and later reassertion of, psychiatric dominance in relation to suicide | p. 168 |
| Extending the possibilities for the 'pathologisation' of suicide | p. 173 |
| Psychoanalytic constructions of the suicidal subject | p. 174 |
| Challenging psychiatric dominance | p. 181 |
| Sociological discourse on suicide | p. 182 |
| Thomas Szasz on suicide | p. 184 |
| Reasserting psychiatric dominance | p. 187 |
| Demarcating the normal and pathological in relation to suicide: psychological autopsy, St Louis, 1959 and 1981 | p. 187 |
| Conclusions | p. 191 |
| The discursive formation of the suicidal subject: Sarah Kane and 4.48 Psychosis, 2000 | p. 193 |
| Introduction | p. 193 |
| Suicidal subjectivities and first-person accounts | p. 194 |
| Sarah Kane, suicide and 4.48 Psychosis | p. 195 |
| 4.48 Psychosis as constituted by 'pathological' discourses on suicide | p. 197 |
| 4.48 Psychosis as a critique of, and resistance to, psychiatric discourse and practices | p. 202 |
| 4.48 Psychosis as subverting foundational psychiatric assumptions of the self and suicide | p. 208 |
| Witnessing a private act | p. 210 |
| Conclusions | p. 213 |
| Summary and conclusions | p. 217 |
| Summary and conclusions | p. 219 |
| Summary of arguments and findings | p. 219 |
| Conclusions | p. 223 |
| References | p. 231 |
| Index | p. 248 |
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