“We've toiled without end”: Publicity, Crisis, and the Suicide “Epidemic” in Greece

Abstract

This paper addresses the rising suicide rate in Greece since the economic crisis began in 2008. By 2011, Greek and international media were reporting the Greek suicide rate as the fastest rising in Europe; dozens of “spectacular” public suicides were taken as symptoms of an “epidemic.” In this paper, I explore different accounts of this “epidemic”: statistical studies and press reports on suicide since the crisis; notes written by people who committed or attempted suicide in public during the crisis; and narratives of suicidality from psychiatric patients before the crisis, in dialogue with local psychiatric epidemiologies. These accounts summon three axes of comparison around suicide in Greece: historical difference, defined by the economic crisis and the time before; locale, contrasting the public sphere of media coverage and consumption with a particular region distinguished by its “suicidogenic” features; and evidence, moving from the public discourse on suicide to clinical ethnographic research that I conducted in northeastern Greece a decade ago. I show that each way of accounting for suicide challenges the epistemologies and evidence at work in the others; the tensions and the interactions among them are signs of indeterminacy in suicide itself, taken as an object of inquiry. In the public discourse on the Greek crisis, the many meanings of suicide have been condensed and fixed as a politics of protest. Yet, I argue, comparison among epistemologies of suicide and recognition of its indeterminacy generate a space for thinking about suicide beyond the publicity of the crisis.

A Clinical Economy of Speculation: Financial Trading and Gambling Disorder in Spain

“…Finally, it organizes the aftermath of financial market failure at the individual level. Drawing from medical anthropology (Conrad ; Castellani ; Davis , ; Kitanaka ; Crowley‐Matoka and True ), the anthropology of debt (Peebles , ; Gregory ; Graeber ; Han ; Weston ; Allon ; James ), and the anthropology of gambling (Klima ; Rizzo ; Reith ; Schüll ; Cassidy, Loussouarn, and Pisac ; Cassidy, Pisac, and Loussouarn ), I suggest that the clinical economy of speculation extends postcrisis regulatory regimes of credit and debt to the general population. From this perspective, I observe how common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when people instead of banks perform them.…”

“…In this regard, Silvia decenters “the straight white men who inhabit our figurative imaginations” (Appel , 55) of financial markets. Her story makes apparent the gendered register of the crisis concept that Janet Roitman () has called into question for being a blind spot that “obscures more than it reveals and produces as much as it represents” (Davis , 1032). For example, Silvia defies the so‐called female solution that emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis and regained momentum three years later during the Eurozone debt crisis.…”

Introduction—Uncertain Visions: Crisis, Ambiguity, and Visual Culture in Greece

“…A corollary of recognizing the crisis as a phenomenon is the idea that there is something new to this phase. The present conjuncture produces new things: new experiences of the past as relevant to the present (Kalantzis , ; Knight , ; Vournelis ), novel socialities around “informal economy” (Rakopoulos :88), new cinematic and theatrical spectacles that disturb dominant national narration (Papanikolaou ), new political discourses that deny official affiliation to parties (Yiakoumaki ), new potentials for dissent (Dalakoglou and Vradis ), enhanced imaginings of colonialism and novel experiences of nationhood (Herzfeld ; Kalantzis , ; Knight ), and new possibilities for reclassifying suicides as political acts (Davis :1020; Knight :62). Many authors describe the “new” as building on preexisting attitudes, for instance regarding the past's reworking in the present (cf.…”

“…Some ethnographers—even those otherwise sympathetic with popular negotiations of austerity—recognize vexing things in anti‐austerity politics, such as reproductions of Eurocentric‐nationalist ideas (Theodossopoulos :501), discontent against foreigners (Herzfeld :23), the reinscription of particular gender dichotomies, and the enhancement of the shame attributed to suicides that do not acquire a public profile (Davis :1023). In fact, the incorrectness of some anti‐austerity performances is key to the ambivalent delight these offer to middle‐class subjects (Kalantzis :1065).…”

“…This critique points to serious issues that emerge from embracing the crisis as an Ur‐category. Consider, for example, the danger of reading all malaise and authoritarianism as symptoms of the present and losing sight of their historical embeddedness, as in suicides that, in Davis’s account, have been part of immanent socialities in Greece way before the crisis (:1028). A reply to Roitman's just critique is partly provided by the fact that in doing ethnography in contemporary Greece, one faces people's invocation of the crisis as a theme, a modality, and a problem.…”