Abstract
Almost three decades ago, historian Howard Kushner writes of his unease at increasingly neurological understandings of behaviour such as suicide. He argues that ‘[o]ne feature of neuropathological approaches, however, seems unaffected by this increasing sophistication: the more scientifically complex these investigations become, the more they tend to ignore the social and historical context in which the behavior that they seek to explain takes place’.1 In these accounts, neurology displaces social context. In characteristically forthright terms, in 2014 Roger Cooter describes the turn to neurological explanations as ‘like becoming the victim of mind parasites’ because these explanations foreclose the ability to think critically about the social and cultural context of the explanations themselves: they are presented as universally true and outside of culture or history.2
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Notes
H. Kushner, ‘Biochemistry, Suicide and History: Possibilities and Problems’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16(1) (1985): 71
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Millard, C. (2015). Conclusion: The Politics of Self-Harm: Social Setting and Self-Regulation. In: A History of Self-Harm in Britain. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-52962-6_7
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