Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance: a critical analysis of UK suicide prevention policies

Oaten, Alexander, Jordan, Ana, Chandler, Amy and Marzetti, Hazel (2023) Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance: a critical analysis of UK suicide prevention policies. Critical Social Policy . ISSN 0261-0183

Full content URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/026101832211425

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Suicide prevention as biopolitical surveillance: a critical analysis of UK suicide prevention policies
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Abstract

Suicide prevention policies set out government strategies and priorities for action and in doing so construct meanings, legitimise knowledge and frame possibilities. Despite their importance, prevention policies remain underexamined and taken for granted. Using Bacchi’s poststructuralist ‘What Is The Problem Represented To Be’ approach we critically analyse UK suicide prevention policies as sites of biopolitical surveillance and consider how suicide is constructed within such policy regimes. Drawing on Foucault, we contextualise suicide as an object and focus of biopolitical surveillance. We argue that suicide prevention policies seek to negate the contingency and complexity of suicide and instead represent it as amenable to biopolitical governance. Prevention policies do this by framing suicide as a visible and predictable object that can be known and governed via surveillance driven risk management. Such policies risk marginalising some publics, and diverting attention from the political, social and economic contexts of injustice in which suicides occur.

Keywords:Biopolitics, Surveillance, Policy analysis
Subjects:L Social studies > L410 UK Social Policy
L Social studies > L200 Politics
L Social studies > L510 Health & Welfare
L Social studies > L431 Health Policy
Divisions:College of Social Science > School of Social & Political Sciences
ID Code:53229
Deposited On:08 Feb 2023 16:05

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