Unliveable Life: State and Corporate Violence in the Making of Suicide
Suicide doesn’t occur in a vacuum—it is complex, multidimensional, and often the result of many intersecting factors building up to make life unliveable. It seems common-sense to say that suicide is the result of mental health issues—an understanding promoted by the World Health Organization, the Movement for Global Mental Health, and by many governments around the world. But might this way of understanding be misguided by overlooking the role of state and corporate harms in producing conditions that make people’s lives unliveable? Or is it mental health itself that needs radical rethinking?
This talk focussed on the suicides of farmers in India and of disabled people in receipt of social security/welfare in the UK. Through these cases, China Mills explored what it might mean to understand suicides as a symptom of state and corporate violence—violence which is slow, normalised, and which eludes simple cause and effect, enabling denial of responsibility from the state and corporations.
About the Social Scientist
China Mills researches mental distress and suicide in contexts of social injustice. She is a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London, and lead researcher on Healing Justice London's Deaths by Welfare project.
