Suicide and the ‘Poison Complex’: Toxic Relationalities, Child Development, and the Sri Lankan Self-Harm Epidemic

Abstract

Widger, Tom (2015) 'Suicide and the`poison complex' : toxic relationalities, child development, and the Sri Lankan self-harm epidemic. ', Medical anthropology., 34 (6 Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Suicide prevention efforts in Asia have increasingly turned to 'quick win' means restriction, while more complicated cognitive restriction and psychosocial programs have been limited. I argue the development of cognitive restriction programs requires greater consideration of suicide methods as social practices, and of how suicide cognitive schemata form. To illustrate this, I offer an ethnographically grounded study of how self-poisoning becomes cognitively available in Sri Lanka. The overwhelming preference for poison as a method of self-harm is not simply reflective of its widespread availability, but rather how cognitive schemata of poison -a 'poison complex' -develops from early childhood and is a precondition for suicide schemata. Limiting cognitive availability thus requires an entirely novel approach to suicide prevention that draws back from its immediate object (methods and causes of selfharm) to engage the wider poison complex of which suicide is just one aspect.

Attempted suicide in Sri Lanka – An epidemiological study of household and community factors

“…Based on the hierarchies that exist in a household, children should not confront, disagree or show strong emotions in front of their elders ( Marecek, 2006 ). The resulting retaliation can take the form of attempted suicide, which is a culturally acceptable form of communicating distress ( Chapin, 2014 , Widger, 2015a ). As we did not collect information on household family relationships, we created an indirect measure of the number of generations in a household by splitting the occupants into four age categories: < 10; 10–25, 26–65 and 65+.…”

Suicides, poisons and the materially possible: The positive ambivalence of means restriction and critical–critical global health

“…I have previously drawn two conclusions from this. The first is that poisons have cultural resonance that make them suitable for use in self-harming and suicidal practice – the use of poison in this way was not merely one of convenience, as MR advocates tend to stress, but informed by the wider significance of poison in social life (Widger, 2015b). The second is that, as a learnt practice, suicide in Madampe develops in conjunction with the acquisition of certain kinds of knowledge around the meanings of poison (Widger, ibid.).…”

“…I have called the linguistic, social, emotional, spatial, and material practices clustering around pesticide suicides a ‘poison complex’ (Widger, 2015b), and argued that the high rate of pesticide suicides found in Sri Lanka is a function of this complex, rather than a straightforward reflection of the widespread availability of poisons in Sri Lanka’s rural communities. Rather than rehearsing these arguments again here, I seek to move the discussion forward to a critical analysis of how MR relates to Sinhala poison practices at two levels.…”

“…Drawing from his Telugu (south Indian) ethnography, Staples (2012) argues that the coalescence of motives and means in this way can be understood as giving rise to a suicide ‘niche’, within which suicidal practices become almost inevitable and can appear at epidemic proportions as people become part of, and are shaped to respond in certain ways due to, the niche. I push Staples’ argument further, to suggest that suicide becomes possible as a social practice only when the material conditions of poison (that is – poison across social, moral, and chemical registers) configure in specific kinds of ways, during moments of relational crisis (Widger, 2015b). Suicide thus becomes one kind of interaction within the poison complex, which redirects the transfer of poison into one’s own body.…”

“…I have described this sociocultural context of suicide elsewhere (Widger, 2012b, 2012a, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c), and my intention in this article is to develop a very different perspective on the issue. Taking my cue from material culture studies, in particular theorizations of person–thing entanglement, I develop an object-oriented approach that seeks to understand suicidal practice from the vantage point of poison – a substance with significant biomoral qualities that renders dangerous chemicals a materially possible means of performing suicide in Madampe.…”