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Suffering, Frustration, and Anger: Class, Gender and History in Sri Lankan Suicide Stories

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Abstract

This paper explores competing stories of suffering, frustration and anger that shape the performance and reception of suicidal behaviours in contemporary Sri Lanka. Drawing from the results of 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how suicidal acts fit within broader narratives of class and gender experience and expression that draw from contemporary and historical ‘folk’ and ‘state’ discourses. Debates over whether suffering, frustration and anger are legitimate socio-effective states to exhibit come to determine the kinds of claims and counter-claims that suicidal people on the one hand, and those charged with their treatment and management on the other, can make with regard to the efficacy of suicide as a means of social action. Through such debates—not only what it means to be suicidal in Sri Lanka but also what it means to be middle class or working class, male or female, etc. are made and remade anew.

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Notes

  1. During my fieldwork, I was often intrigued by the extent to which Sri Lankan politicians as well as heads of state framed their policies and programmes in terms of ‘reducing the suffering of the people’ rather than, as would seem to be more common in the west, ‘increasing well-being’.

  2. It was while I was working with the NYSC in Madampe in 2001 that I first became aware of Sri Lanka’s suicide problem, and decided to return after completing training in anthropology to study it.

  3. A well-thumbed copy of Where There Is No Psychiatrist—A Mental Health Care Manual sat on the shelf of the new clinic as a reminder of those earlier days.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK

    Tom Widger

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Widger, T. Suffering, Frustration, and Anger: Class, Gender and History in Sri Lankan Suicide Stories. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 225–244 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9250-6

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