THE NUMBERS

The official Greek suicide rate is produced, certified, and publicized by ELSTAT, the third incarnation of a national statistical agency in Greece since 1925. In 2010, in light of accusations that consecutive Greek governments had underreported and then overstated the sovereign debt, ELSTAT was inaugurated in alignment with the European Statistical System (ESS), established by the European parliament in 2009 to coordinate member states with the European statistical agency, Eurostat. Surges in media coverage of the suicide “epidemic” in Greece have usually followed the publication of ELSTAT's suicide statistics, or their public declaration by government officials. Blogging skeptics have accused ELSTAT of “concealing” or “halving” the “real” suicide statistics, pointing to the much higher numbers reported by municipal police throughout the country (Galani Reference Galani2013; Katohika 2013). It is important to note that this skepticism is not aimed at statistics per se, but rather at official statistics, indicating a “trust in numbers” (Porter Reference Porter1995) that is anchored in a mistrust of the state. The NGO Klimaka supplements the official statistics with others that it collects and publicizes regarding the number of callers, their suicidal ideation and motivation, and their attempts. These figures also contest the official ones, since they are drawn not from state agencies but from alternative sources such as undertakers, churches, and victims' relatives (Gatopoulos Reference Gatopoulos2013). In press reports of the ELSTAT figures, Klimaka representatives are often quoted as experts positioned to correct and elaborate on them. The more complex and usually more ominous pictures these representatives paint do not so much undermine the cogency and pertinence of suicide statistics as they reinforce the urgency of communicating the real numbers to the public. In this way, the crisis has worked to turn a population, the object of statistics, into a public.

In the Greek discourse on suicide, this statistical public has emerged as a proxy for society generally. In April 2012, following a wave of public suicides, Aris Violatzis, a psychiatrist with Klimaka, said, “The social framework in Greece has become pathogenic—we have a morbid social environment where one of its symptoms is suicide” (Kermeliotis Reference Kermeliotis2012). In this imagination of social morbidity, Violatzis and many other mental health professionals addressing the suicide “epidemic” in Greece rehearse and at times explicitly refer to Émile Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide. Economou and colleagues, for example, frame their findings as supporting evidence for “Durkheim's seminal work on social integration and suicide” (Reference Economou2013: 57). Durkheim analyzed suicide statistics from European states throughout the nineteenth century and proposed a typology of three types of suicide—egoistic, altruistic, anomic—that he traced to three types of social conditions disposing a small but definite part of each population toward “voluntary death”: social disintegration, excessive social integration, and radical social change, respectively. The stability of the suicide rate within each society and its variability across societies made it a sensitive gauge of discrete social conditions, and indeed, Durkheim argued, a much better index of the characteristic “moral condition” of each society than any other demographic statistics. Dismissing individual motives as practically if not essentially unknowable even to psychological science, he promoted instead the method of “moral statistics” to locate the causes of suicide in social dysfunction and malaise. “When these sufferings are expressed by a theorist,” he observed, “they may be considered exaggerated and unfaithfully interpreted. But in these statistics of suicide they speak for themselves, allowing no room for personal interpretation” (Reference Durkheim, Simpson, Spaulding and Simpson1951 [1897]: 391).

With Durkheim's and other studies, modern suicidology emerged alongside other arenas of sociological purview in nineteenth-century Europe, impelled by what Ian Hacking calls the “avalanche of numbers” generated by increasingly self-consciously nationalist European states (Reference Hacking1990: 2, 5, passim). Hacking sees the sociology of suicide as a paradigm case in the rise of “indeterminism” in natural and social science from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries—a shift from causal laws to statistical laws governing nature and society alike (ibid.: 2). The succession of scientific explanation in terms of “necessity” by explanation in terms of “regularity” was, by Hacking's account, an intricate process. Perhaps its most significant consequence lay in how early social statisticians resolved the problem of “statistical fatalism”: that statistical regularities on the level of the populations seemed to entail determinism, or lack of free will, on the individual level. Hacking frames this problem as a political question of social control—Which populations would be affected or blamed in a given social trend?—that masqueraded as a metaphysical question of causality. He argues that the question was resolved not politically but rather conceptually, by the theorization of individual “propensities” or “penchants” toward social trends (ibid.: 122), most urgently crime and suicide. From this theorization, Durkheim developed what Hacking calls an “emergentist philosophy” (ibid.: 178), which identified sociology's object as the “sui generis” “collective forces” emerging from the interactions of individuals (ibid.: 159). These forces, for Durkheim, were irreducible to the individual, autonomous from the individual, and more compelling than individual will, yet they did not determine individual action.

This abstraction of collective forces from individual experience positioned them for comparison, the method from which Durkheim derived his confidence in the transparency of suicide statistics as against the ambiguity of individual motives. It was only through the difference in suicide rates across historical periods, and across regions and states, that the social causality of suicide could be discerned from the social fact of the suicide rate. In verifying the morbidity of a particular society, suicide statistics were in this sense essentially comparative. As Janet Roitman says of the concept of crisis itself, “[T]he affirmation that ‘this society is breaking down’ requires a comparison, a comparative state of affairs” (Reference Roitman2014: 15). In the comparative state of affairs described by statistics, Hacking pays special attention to the rivalry between France and England from the nineteenth century onward, noting, “That statistics should be comparative is part of their original mandate to ensure the power and wealth of the state, as compared with other states” (Reference Hacking1990: 77). Michel Foucault likewise identified statistics as among the most important tools in “the science of police” developed by European states in the wake of the Thirty Years War, defined as “the set of means necessary to make the forces of the state increase from within,” or the “theory and analysis” of the living forces and resources of the state (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1997: 69). Foucault situated the relations of power and assemblages of knowledge comprising this science of police in the external and internal alignments of the state—war, in relation to enemy states, and welfare, in relation to the national population (ibid.: 71)—with both turning on each state's competitive position relative to others.

The context of comparison in Europe today has of course shifted from a framework of war to one of cooperation, but without displacing the importance of difference among European states. Indeed, commentators on the Eurozone crisis have observed that, since the advent of the common currency, trade surpluses in “core” states like Germany have depended on trade deficits and fueled the growth of public debt in “peripheral” states like Greece, a “skewed” system that ultimately led to the current crisis.Footnote ⁵ In this light, it is important to note that Durkheim's Suicide was written not only as a methodological treatise with potentially universal application, but also as a commentary on the crisis Europe faced at the turn of the twentieth century. This was, he wrote, a period of “deep disturbance” and “collective sadness” marked by higher-than-ever suicide rates across Europe, even if European societies manifested this disturbance and sadness at varying rates (Reference Durkheim, Simpson, Spaulding and Simpson1951: 391). Much as Durkheim's sociology of religion identified the sacredness of society expressed in totemic ritual with the indigenous societies of colonial Australia, his innovations in moral statistics identified suicide as a metric of crisis with Europe as a “civilization” in a “state of crisis” (ibid.: 369).

In returning to Durkheim, it is worth asking what his legacy of moral statistics does for the study of suicide in Greece today, in a comparative European perspective. To address this question, we must contend with the array of variously staked claims to “Greek exceptionalism” in the European economic crisis. In the keynote address at the 2013 symposium of the Modern Greek Studies Association, for example, the economist (and minister of finance, January–July 2015) Yanis Varoufakis disparaged the very phrasing of “the Greek crisis” as a symptom of Greek exceptionalism. He described this term as an entrenched discursive reflex that expressed contempt and blame from outside Greece, and among Greeks themselves, a certain sense of “self-importance,” “hubris,” even “megalomania” (Reference Varoufakis2014: 18, 17). Dalakoglou and Vradis likewise deconstruct the perception of Greece as a “State of Exception” within Europe as an Orientalist fantasy of a “territory in which all sorts of peculiarities, diversions, and anomalies can prevail.” In this fantasy, they argue, Greece appears in cultural terms as “Oriental,” in administrative-economic terms as “developing,” and in political terms as prone to “social and class antagonism” manifested in protests: “‘[Greeks] riot so often, and there are thousands of them in the streets’” (Reference Dalakoglou, Vradis, Vradis and Dalakoglou2011: 23). Although they do not question the implication of crisis-thinking itself in such problematic declarations of Greek exceptionalism, Dalakoglou and Vradis, like Varoufakis, are concerned to refute the distinctiveness or isolation of the Greek locale and experience of the crisis, which they understand instead as a “global condition” (ibid.: 24).

Whether or not the widespread sense of Greek distinctiveness in extremity is warranted in comparative perspective, it is plainly a meaningful part of how the crisis has been experienced in Greece. The rising suicide rate has shaped how Greeks understand who they are, or who they have come to be since the crisis, in (implied) comparison to other peoples of the Eurozone, starting from the truism reproduced in many reports on the suicide “epidemic” that, given the low suicide rate in Greece throughout its modern history, the current crisis marks the historical threshold of suicide as a social problem there. Yet it is also, by the same token, a sign of Greece's Europeanization. That is, even as the rising suicide rate in Greece stands in Greek public discourse as a clear sign of exceptional crisis, the statistics establish a grid for comparing Greece with other European states in terms that dismantle Greek exceptionalism. To think instead in terms of a European crisis, or perhaps of the European front of a global crisis, one could just as easily turn to Spain, which has since 2008 had only slightly lower rates of both unemployment and suicide increase than Greece. A number of public suicides in Spain by people evicted from their homes set off massive demonstrations in Madrid in February 2013 (Sainz and Clendenning Reference Sainz and Clendenning2013). In light of these parallels between Greece and Spain, what difference does it make that, compared to an average unemployment rate of 12 percent for the entire Eurozone in September 2013, unemployment was reported at 28 percent in Greece but “only” 25.65 percent in Spain (TradingEconomics.com)? Or that Greece's suicide rate in 2011 was much lower (at 4.2 per 100,000) than Spain's (6.74), and Germany's (11.9), not to mention Lithuania's (33.38)?Footnote ⁶

Even if the national suicide rate functions as a kind of fulcrum in Greece's ever-shifting relation to Europe, statistical comparisons between Greece and other states in crisis need not be limited to the Eurozone. Many recent studies of localized suicide “epidemics” elsewhere also feature economic factors in their explanations, including development policies, market liberalization, and the rapid growth of wealth disparities, as well as debt crises and austerity-based “structural adjustment.” While the prevalence of these factors across otherwise disparate locales might invite regional or national comparisons of suicide “epidemics,” the authors of these studies decline to draw causal inferences about suicide from shared economic trends, and focus instead on how such trends are entangled with particular affective and ethical changes in the societies concerned—changes associated with new temporalities of social life, prospects of violence and risk, forms of transactional sociality, and experiences of disenchantment and thwarted aspiration.Footnote ⁷

As these other scenes of suicidality attest, statistics cannot specify suicide as a gauge of suffering in one society as compared with any other, and in fact, by this gauge Greeks would appear to be suffering substantially less than almost any other national population on earth. It is the recent rise in the suicide rate within Greece that indicates its social morbidity, to those looking through a Durkheimian lens. The diagnostic work performed by suicide statistics thus embeds regional or national comparisons within historical comparisons. The latter figure much more prominently than regional-national ones in the contemporary discourse on suicide in Greece, allowing the rhetoric of Greek exceptionalism to flourish. In discussing the suicide “epidemic” with historians of Greece, I have often been asked whether and how this crisis might be distinguished from other crises in Greek history. The suicide rate, after all, consistently peaked at such times throughout the twentieth century (Katsimardos Reference Katsimardos2013)—a history of wars, coups, dictatorships, and displacements, of mass death and mass exodus.

With such historical comparisons in mind, Daniel Knight (Reference Knight2013b) observes a distinctive “polytemporality” in Greek narratives of the current crisis that summon the dynamic reverberations of past periods of high suicide rates (the stock market crash of 1999–2000), of destitution and deprivation (the famine of 1941–1943Footnote ⁸ ), and of colonization (the Ottoman and Nazi periods). The ways in which Greeks seize on these historical reverberations to substantiate their experience of the current crisis, in Knight's view, are modes of reckoning accountability—pointing to “their” greed or “ours” as causal explanations and moral vectors of blame. In exploring this “recurrence” of crisis, Knight develops the concept of “cultural proximity” between past events and the present to describe a certain “condens[ation]” of historical time (Reference Knight2012: 350) by which those past events become component parts of the “assemblage” of the current crisis (ibid.: 360, 369, passim).

While Knight takes the constitutive polytemporality of crisis narratives as a crucial resource for Greeks as they try to make sense of their present suffering, this same polytemporality may also work to occlude the novel, distinctive features of the crisis today. These include the very public nature of several “spectacular” suicides in Greece, which have unfolded in a recursive relationship with the public alarm surrounding the ongoing suicide “epidemic.” This recursive publicity appears more clearly in the stories of those who attempted or committed suicide than it does in the public discourse about the suicide rate, and it is to those stories that I now turn.

THE NOTES

A series of horrifying public suicides in Greece in 2011–2012 brought to public visibility a series of suicide notes, some published and some not, blaming the austerity measures, overwhelming debt, the wealthy and powerful classes, the Greek state, and the TroikaFootnote ⁹ for the victims' loss of dignity and hope for the future. In media coverage, these notes have been framed as transparent proof of the authors' intentions to commit suicide as a political act of protest.

The first of these protests took place on 16 September 2011. Apostolos Polyzonis, an unemployed man of fifty-five whose small business had been ruined when his bank recalled his loan, doused himself with fuel and lit himself on fire in front of his bank in Thessaloniki. A graphic video of his act was immediately posted on Greek and international press and blogger websites. Polyzonis survived and, in time, began to participate in the public discourse on suicide in Greece, becoming a strong voice of protest against government corruption (Hadjimatheou Reference Hadjimatheou2011).

Less than a week after Polyzonis's self-immolation, on 21 September, Michael Kriadis, the director of an advertising firm in Athens, jumped to his death from his fourth-floor office. He had apparently just learned that an impending merger with another company had failed, destroying any prospect of his staving off bankruptcy. His firm reportedly owed about 400,000 Euros, but was itself owed almost 5 million Euros that it had been unable to collect. Kriadis reportedly left suicide notes for his family, friends, and employers on his office desk, but they were never published (Inews 2011; Hadjimatheou Reference Hadjimatheou2011).

Perhaps the best-known public suicide in Greece transpired a few months later, on 4 April 2012. Dimitris Christoulas, seventy-seven, a retired pharmacist and pensioner whose pension had recently been cut, shot himself outside the Parliament building in central Athens. Witnesses offered various accounts of Christoulas's last moments; several claimed that, as he reached for the gun in his pocket, he shouted: “We must not leave debts to our children,” or “I'm not killing myself, they're killing me” (Madata 2012a). A note found in his coat pocket was reprinted dozens of times in the Greek press in the days after his death:

Christoulas's daughter spoke to the press after his memorial service the next day: “My father's handwritten note leaves no room for misinterpretation. His whole life was spent as a leftist fighter, a selfless visionary. This final act was a conscious political act, entirely consistent with what he believed and did in his life” (Maltezou Reference Maltezou2012; Ghosh Reference Ghosh2012). Much has been made in the press of the reference in his suicide note to Tsolakoglou, a Greek military officer and collaborator who became the first prime minister during the Nazi occupation in 1941–1942. Perceptions of German responsibility for the austerity measures imposed by the Troika are widespread among Greeks, who compare the current Greek debt to Europe with Germany's debt to Greece dating to the Nazi occupation. Such critics insistently recall Germany's failure to pay lawful reparations for the devastation it wreaked upon the Greek population and national infrastructure and to repay forced loans to the Reich issued by the Bank of Greece. Given this commonplace reckoning of German accountability for the Greek crisis, the Greek press for the most part endorsed Christoulas's allegation of trans-historical identity between the Nazi occupation and the governance of Greece by the Troika. On the other hand, as Effrosyni Rantou observes, Christoulas pointed just as resolute a finger of blame at the enemy within Greece—“the traitors of this country”—and thus, with his note, performed a simultaneous affirmation and shattering of national unity (n.d.: 10, 12).Footnote ¹¹

A few weeks after Christoulas's death, on 21 April 2012, Savvas Metoikidis, a forty-four-year-old teacher and active member of the Athens teachers' union, hanged himself in the shed behind his family's house in Stavroupoli, a village in northeastern Greece where he had been spending the Easter holiday. Bloggers and journalists speculated that he might have chosen this date, the forty-fifth anniversary of the military junta's coup d’état, in order to frame his suicide as political protest (see, for instance, Heidi@homeingreece 2012). Local newspapers reported that Metoikidis left behind two letters, neither of which has been published. One was addressed to his family and included instructions for how they might settle his debts. The other the press described as a “manifesto” with “clear political content,” in which he explained his suicide as a “protest act for the impact of the crisis on the Greek society” (Madata 2012b).

Two days later, on 23 April, a thirty-five-year-old priest in the Peloponnese jumped from his balcony. On the same day, geology lecturer Nikos Palyvos, at thirty-eight, hanged himself from a lamppost in Athens (Tsolakidou Reference Tsolakidou2012). A month later, on 24 May, Antonis Perris, a sixty-year-old musician, jumped with his ninety-year-old mother from their fifth- or sixth-story apartment in Athens. The night before, on a Greek music online forum, Perris had posted a note that has been reposted on many other sites and published in a number of Greek newspapers:

In this post, Perris, like Christoulas, identified his destitution as the cause of his despair and, in turn, of his suicide. Their notes might thus seem to affirm the connection observed so often in Greece between suicide and unemployment, poverty, and debt. Yet the writings of Perris and Christoulas express anger as much as despair; their desire for violence against those they hold responsible—to take up arms, or to hang the perpetrators—is explicit. In their expression of anger and threats of violence, the suicide notes bear a strong affinity with other forms of public protest enacted during the same period. Street protesters, contending with rampant police violence, frequently thematized righteous anger in their demonstrations.Footnote ¹³ The wave of public suicides in Greece followed several years of mass demonstrations against the austerity measures, government corruption, police brutality, and capitalism generally. Histories of protest during the crisis often begin with the revolt of December 2008, when young Greeks—“high school students, along with university students, immigrants, Anarchists, antiexousiastes (antiauthoritarians), urban guerrillas, the lumpen, the poor,” as Neni Panourgiá names the participants (Reference Panourgiá2010: 200)—rioted for three weeks in Athens and other cities after Alexis Grigoropoulos, a fifteen-year-old student, was shot and killed by police.Footnote ¹⁴ Demonstrations started on a mass scale in May 2010 when the Greek government signed its first “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Troika. Up to five hundred thousand people participated, reaching well beyond the “radical youth” demographic to incorporate middle-aged and elderly people, many of whom had lost jobs or pensions. The demonstrations lasted months at a time;Footnote ¹⁵ they were coordinated across the country but concentrated in Syntagma Square, in front of the Parliament building in central Athens—the very scene of Christoulas's suicide.

This convergence highlights the continuity between these forms of protest, the progression of mass demonstrations into singular acts of suicide, with the street as a constant public stage. The recognition of public suicide as a political act entails this context of protest; authorship and publicity go hand in hand. Along these lines, in the media the anger of public suicides has usually been read in terms of politics rather than the emotional distress of disturbed individuals. The avowed leftist political orientation of several of the suicide victims, Christoulas and Metoikidis most prominently, enhances this sense of political intent.

I have only mentioned here public suicides that attracted the most press attention; many others were reported throughout Greece in 2011 and 2012. Their locations—outside the home, often on city streets in front of crowds of strangers—and the explicit content of the notes have been taken by commentators as signs of authorship: signs that these people intended their suicides quite literally to be seen as acts of protest. Even in cases where suicide notes were not published, the existence of a note was publicized, and its contents read as expressing the same kind of authorship of the same act of protest. Authorship of the notes is easily conflated with authorship of suicide, on the premise that the reasons people give for their actions account for those actions—a premise rejected by Durkheim over a century ago and by many others since then, in their critiques of psychologism and empiricism in anthropology (Crapanzano Reference Crapanzano1992; Good Reference Good1994).Footnote ¹⁶

The suicide note is a deceptively transparent genre of explanation. With the public suicides in Greece, notes traded on the already-dense public discourse about the rising suicide rate. In the background of these public deaths was a much larger number of other, if not exactly private, then at least less visible deaths by suicide, committed by people alone, inside their homes or cars. The media has treated public suicides as different in kind from all those quiet suicides that add up to most of the rate. As Nikos Sideris, a psychoanalyst in Athens, remarked to Reuters: ”We're seeing a whole new category: political suicide” (Kirschbaum Reference Kirschbaum2012). The genuine novelty of this category is arguable, but claims to its novelty effectively fix it to the crisis as a symptom even more calamitous than the suicide rate itself.

To understand these protest suicides as “authored” acts is to disregard the embeddedness of the suicide rate in the social conditions of suicidality. In his study of suicide in Germany under Nazi rule, Christian Goeschel explores the role of publicity in investing the suicide rate with social efficacy and shaping Germans' orientations to suicide. On his account, the Nazis exaggerated and exploited suicide statistics to delegitimize the Weimar Republic—often depicted in the press as an “inherently suicidal environment” (Reference Goeschel2009: 22)—and then obscured and falsified them after their own rise to power, when improved economic conditions brought no reduction in the suicide rate (ibid.: 68). Reading suicide statistics alongside dozens of suicide notes from this period, Goeschel notes a convergence between the public discourse of suicide as represented in newspapers and the “private representations” of suicide in notes written by individuals: “Sometimes the macro- and micro-level overlapped, as in cases where suicide notes incorporated the socio-economic diagnosis popularized in the daily press” (ibid.: 55, 168). The Nazis attempted to intercede in this interaction by banning the publication of suicide statistics in 1940–1941 in order to prevent their use “by the enemy” to demoralize the German public and undermine the regime (ibid.: 119). In this policy, Goeschel points out, the Nazis mirrored the Soviets, who concealed suicide statistics in support of the view that communism had “overcome” suicide (ibid.: 24, citing von Hentig Reference von Hentig1927: 252–53).

From a different direction, Lisa Stevenson approaches the social efficacy of the suicide rate in her ethnography of the Inuit “suicide epidemic” in the Canadian arctic (Reference Stevenson, Borneman and Hammoudi2009: 57). She cites the high and disproportionate suicide rate in Inuit communities, which continues to increase alongside prevention efforts and “intense media attention” (ibid.: 60). Parsing Foucault on the governmental capacitation of life—“‘Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality’” (Reference Stevenson2012: 603, citing Foucault Reference Foucault and Macey2003: 248)—she presents the state's attempts to bring Inuit mortality rates into line with Canadian norms as part of a broader process of social integration. When “becoming Canadian mean[s], in part, to die at Canadian rates” (ibid.: 595), the prospect of failing to live broaches Inuit difference as an existential question: “Statistics play an important role in making suicide—even suicide as a counterfactual—real. […] All Inuit youth live in prognosis, all live in the misalignment between statistical probabilities of their death and the existential fact of their life or death” (ibid.: 603).

Stevenson implies that suicidality has become ingrained in Inuit sociality at least in part due to the colonial, paternalistic marking of Inuit communities as especially prone to suicide. In Greece, suicide statistics have come to play a similar role in defining and materializing sociality, but they describe a sudden and uncharacteristic vulnerability, given Greece's historically low suicide rate. Daniel Knight, working for the last decade in Trikala in central Greece, observes the waning of the traditional “taboo” on suicide as it has grown increasingly common (Reference Knight2013a: 150, Reference Knight2013b: 12), and as its causes are increasingly located “away from the Self ” (Reference Knight2013a: 155), proximately in “economic hardship” (Reference Knight2013a: 150) and ultimately in “political and economic systems” (Reference Knight2013b: 17). Residents of Trikala, Knight reports, having heard about or directly witnessed local suicides in recent years, see the wave of suicides elsewhere in Greece as “public examples of local realities that no longer inhabit the realms of the extraordinary” (Reference Knight2013b: 16). In this context, the public suicides in Greece raise questions about the social efficacy of statistics that reach beyond the enigma of “living in prognosis,” as Stevenson puts it. How does it change the meaning of suicide that Greeks may want to be a statistic, to count in the suicide rate? How can we understand the singularity of public suicides in relation to the normativity of suicide more generally?

The waning of the stigma and taboo around suicide helps to account for the novelty of protest suicides in Greece today. Comparing three suicide narratives from three different moments in twentieth-century Greece, Stavroula Pipyrou identifies the shame surrounding suicide—binding the immorality of the act to a folk genetics of madness impugning the entire family of a victimFootnote ¹⁷ —as a consistent motivation for families to conceal or transfigure the suicides of their relatives. Devising alternative “affective narratives” of suicide for public consumption, she argues—disguising it as homicide, for example, or blaming it on witchcraft—allowed families to transform a “bad death” into a “good death” more “palatable” to the public, thereby “redirect[ing] public imagination” and preserving family “honor” and “reputation” (Reference Pipyrou2014: 189, 197, 190, 191–92). The terms of honor and shame in which Pipyrou interprets Greek families' responses to suicide depend on a rigid, clear-cut division of public and private, assigning the contestation of honor to the public domain and the source or threat of shame to the private sphere of the family. While it is well beyond the scope of this paper to address the honor-and-shame paradigm in Mediterraneanist anthropology,Footnote ¹⁸ I think it is useful here to engage this paradigm to examine the gendering of public and private space in the Greek suicide “epidemic.”

The dominant interpretation of public suicides in Greece as political protests would appear, along the lines suggested by Pipyrou, to transform these “bad deaths” into “good deaths” in the public imagination. The intentional enactment of the suicides in public space would, likewise, seem to contest the shame associated with suicide; the visibility of these deaths and the publication of the victims' notes were geared for public consumption, and it was this very publicity that ennobled these suicides as political rather than pathological in nature. The frequent trope of “dignity” in the suicide notes suggests that honor and shame were indeed at stake in the victims' communication with the public. But in these cases, contrary to the social history of suicide documented by Pipyrou, the victims' honor was affirmed rather than damaged by their suicides. According to their notes, the indignity at stake was associated not with death but with the lives they had been leading: their impoverishment and desperation, and especially their inability to repay debts. Michael Herzfeld, returning to John Campbell's Reference Campbell1964 study of the Sarakatsani, points out that debt, and obligation more broadly, has, historically, functioned as the “ethical nexus of all social relations” in Greece. The reciprocity entailed by alternately owing and loaning has been widely reckoned there as the very currency of social relationships, taking on not only economic but also “sexual, interpersonal, or political” dimensions as they develop over time. In this context, Herzfeld argues, “one-way indebtedness” of the kind symbolized by the Troika's “bailout” packages—like the crushing consumer debt carried by individuals—threatens to undermine the reciprocal obligations that make social relationships work, and thus the “dignity” and “autonomy” of individuals involved in those relationships (Reference Herzfeld2011: 24).Footnote ¹⁹

The notion of dignity as a value bound up in the successful management of credit and debt is deeply, if implicitly, gendered. It is important to acknowledge that men have committed most of the recent public suicides in Greece, and by quite a large margin. The language of dignity in their suicide notes makes for perhaps too easy a match with the Mediterraneanist imagination of men's public defense of their honor.Footnote ²⁰ At the very least, the connection these men drew between dignity and suicide suggests a change in the relationship between the public/private dichotomy and the honor/shame dichotomy in Greek public discourse. In anthropological discourse, the honor-and-shame paradigm is embedded in a functionalist vision of Mediterranean society in which narrative meaning-making serves as a mechanism of social stability. The danger suicide seems to pose is to the meaningful coherence and reproduction of social hierarchies; this is the reason shame “functions” to deter it. This danger may be redressed narratively, as Pipyrou suggests, by crafting new interpretations of suicide. From this functionalist perspective, the goal of anthropological analysis is to contextualize particular narratives as “making sense.”

I do see contextualization as an important step, and would argue that the framing of public suicides in Greece as political protests does indeed indicate such a process of contextual sense-making. That said, I do not think this process should stand as the only or even the most important object of anthropological analysis. Narratives do not always work to create coherent meaning, and social stability as the end of narrative sense-making cannot be taken for granted under any circumstances, least of all in times of crisis. More pressing, perhaps, is the political freight of re-contextualized narrative, which itself demands interpretation and critique. The politicization of suicide as protest in Greece, for example, while dignifying deaths that might otherwise be considered shameful, reproduces not only the gendering of public and private space, but also the prospect of shame for all those who commit suicide quietly, in private. To explore these stakes of suicide in Greece, I turn next to some of those private suicides, committed mostly by women, in the years before the crisis.

THE CLINIC, IN THE TIME BEFORE

As I confront the suicide “epidemic” in Greece, my thoughts turn back to the psychiatric clinics where I worked in northeastern Greece between 2001 and 2004. Those were the “boom” years, the peak of liberalization and European investment in Greece that had started in the 1980s. It was the time of the “Athens facelift” leading up to the 2004 Olympics. The Euro had been adopted in 2002, consumer credit was flowing fast, and with mortgages came a surge in housing construction. Greece seemed to be struck with “development fever,” as Dalakoglou and Vradis put it: infrastructure projects yielded highways, subways, airports, and improvements in telecommunications, along with “a certain euphoria mixed with longing, the longing to become ‘Western,’ to finally ‘make it’” (Reference Dalakoglou, Vradis, Vradis and Dalakoglou2011: 13). Even in Thrace, the northeastern hinterland, a massive new regional hospital opened in 2002, financed by European Union grants. This hospital became the primary site of my research on therapeutic relationships in the wake of Greek psychiatric reform. European retail chains were springing up in Alexandroupolis, the regional capital, where I lived. A brand-new airline introduced daily flights between Alexandroupolis and Athens, bringing the periphery within an easy 45 minutes of the center.

It was a different time. But what strikes me, in thinking back to that time, is how little these signs of national prosperity made their way into residents' perceptions of the region. Thrace was the poorest region in Greece then, as it is today. It had the highest unemployment rate then, as it does today.Footnote ²¹ And it had one of the highest suicide rates.Footnote ²²

The ordinariness of death by suicide in the region came across to me as a sort of consensus in the group therapy sessions I attended at the hospital in Alexandroupolis. Patients in the psychiatric clinic there often spoke of their lives in the margins: of isolation and neglect, exhaustion by their work on the land, their imprisonment in a regional history of poverty, and the special toll one war after another took on the rural population. At one group session, the discussion fixated on a recent suicide in the news, a local woman who had drowned herself in the sea. The topic was first broached by Areti, a middle-aged woman I had met months before when the clinic director interviewed her before an audience of medical students. She was known to the staff as a chronic depressive, admitted for short periods several times each year. That particular morning, when the psychologist leading the group therapy session pressed her to talk, Areti confessed that she was very upset about the suicide of her close friend and neighbor over the weekend, the same woman who had been on the news. She said, “My village has seen many suicides over the years. A neighbor of ours hanged himself in his shed last winter. His wife had been ill for thirty years. And there have been others.”

An elderly patient seated next to Areti, whom Areti soon identified as her aunt who lived in her village, gave a rambling account of a young woman who had left her clothing in a bundle by the seashore and “was lost.” Areti explained to us that this was not the suicide of her friend the previous weekend, but rather of her aunt's sister many years before, when Areti was a child. The psychologist expressed alarm at the apparent frequency of suicides in their village, and Areti agreed: “Many have died from this illness. Now that it's taken my friend, I can't get the thought of suicide out of my mind. I'm afraid I'll make an attempt, myself. I dread it, but it's always been in my plans. When I think of my future, I always imagine death as a way out of this cycle: relapse, hospital, home, relapse.”

Group therapy was attended that morning by Chrisanthi, a young woman diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a self-described arsonist and heroin addict who had overdosed in the clinic just a few weeks before. An emergency tracheotomy had left her unable to speak except in a ghostly rasp, which seemed to issue from the bandaged wound in her throat, lending a grim authority to her contributions. She described her own recent suicide attempt, one of many in her life, she said, which had included jumping off the balcony at her group home and slicing her wrists with a kitchen knife. “This time was the same,” she told us. “My friend smuggled some heroin into the clinic when he visited me. The substance of death [ουσία θανάτου]—I took enough to cause a stroke.” The psychologist remarked that she was lucky this had happened in the morning, when all the doctors were working; if it had been nighttime, with only one doctor on call, Chrisanthi might have been lost. But Chrisanthi refused to call it luck. “It wasn't my time to die, and so I lived,” she said. “But death is only a matter of time. This is how I read all of my suicide attempts. They're just my fate, as it's written for me.” Areti, too, invoked death as fate, a common one in this region, communicated from one villager to the next.

Soon after this session I met a patient at a provincial health center who offered, as her autobiography, something like an etiology of the regional suicide rate. A middle-aged woman diagnosed with depression, Paraskevi avowed her “gift with words” in a rural dialect I had rarely heard in Alexandroupolis. She was introduced to me by her therapist as a “true local” who had spent her entire life in this town in the Rodopis foothills. She was born at the end of the Civil War, in a village that had nearly vanished during the famine of the 1940s and was absorbed by the town over the following decade. The eldest of three children, Paraskevi had assumed the task of raising her siblings when her mother became depressed. She told me the story: “A few years later, my mother fell to her illness. I suppose I inherited this from her, this fragility. By the age of twelve I was mature and responsible. I was strong enough to run the household. But my whole childhood I was absorbing injuries from the stress and from my father's callousness. The neglect. I got married when I was sixteen, not for love but because I needed to escape from the house. Even then, I thought of my husband as a co-worker, like I do now. He shared my goals: to have a traditional home and family. But he was nothing more to me.”

Paraskevi and her husband were both employed at a local factory during most of their married life, trading shifts so that one could be home with the children at night. She worked non-stop for years, “like an animal,” she said, summoning from internal reserves the strength she needed to earn, build, and provide for others. But then, she told me, “Suddenly, one day, at the age of forty, I woke up feeling lifeless, beyond old, as if I'd lived several lifetimes already. My spirit abandoned me. I considered my achievements: my tidy house, my children's education, my financial security, the respect of our neighbors. I could not fathom the purpose of all my hard work. My body was so much dead weight that I dragged through the routine of daily life. I was haunted by the image of a gallows. I began to yearn for death.”

A friend, worried at the change she perceived in Paraskevi's demeanor, brought her to the provincial health center, and she more or less willingly began supportive therapy and a regime of anti-depressants that dulled her urge to die. She told me she was able now to take pleasure in the company of her family and friends, and she enjoyed cooking and gardening.

Her legacy, her inheritance—Paraskevi characterized her own depression by its familiarity, both in her childhood and in her community. She told me that many in this region were afflicted by the same illness. “You're always hearing about suicides. I'm a simple woman, I'm unschooled, I have no perspective. But I think their experience must be like mine: we've all ‘drawn’ too much in our lives. We've toiled without end, without happiness.” The word she used for “drawn”—τραβήξαμε—denotes the physical act of hauling a heavy burden, as well as the passive endurance or suffering of a painful experience. “The poverty is less brutal now than when I was a child, after the wars. But today there is also less joy. Those who suffer the way I have are not crazy [τρελλοί]. You can't see the effects from outside. Who would look at me, this sturdy, dynamic woman, surrounded by family and friends, and suspect that I am ill? This kind of illness is a disease of the spirit. It doesn't show itself. It's more insidious than insanity. It draws people to death secretly. They are being buried now three-deep in the churchyards. It's all the land is good for these days.”

In the psychiatric clinics of Thrace, the sign of suicidality migrated between depressive disorder—for patients like Paraskevi and Areti, who lived in chronic but undramatic despair—and personality disorder, for patients like Chrisanthi, for whom the threat of suicide was confounded with drug use and often interpreted by clinicians as reckless irresponsibility or manipulation. The personality disorders of these latter patients were recursively intertwined with a “cultural diagnostics” of their pathogenic communities, very often mapped onto the region's Gypsy population (Davis Reference Davis2010; Reference Davis2012). One psychiatrist, a policy reformer with decades of clinical experience in Thrace, addressed this kind of pathology. His textbook on social psychiatry explains that the explosive crises that occasionally erupt in the “antisocial” personality type can “provoke in people with similar personalities a chain reaction of irritation or aggressive rage” directed at oneself or others, as in “epidemics of suicides or self-mutilation,” which, the text reports, are “well-known in communities that shelter psychopathic persons.” The disorder thus presents itself more as a “community problem” than a therapeutic one in such environments (Sakellaropoulos Reference Sakellaropoulos1995: 242, 239).

While to many psychiatrists this cultural form of “antisocial” suicidality appeared to be the province of Gypsies, non-Gypsy patients like Areti and Paraskevi articulated a parallel epidemiology to account for the high rate of suicide in the Greek communities of Thrace. For these patients, in its “depressive” mode, too, suicidality was perceived as a community problem or a regional problem, a chronic condition that could explode and spread like contagion under shared conditions of poverty and hopelessness.

The sociality of suicide was thus part and parcel of its epidemiology in Thrace in the early 2000s. This epidemiology represents, perhaps, a departure from the “individualized, ‘internalized,’ pathologized, de-politicized and ultimately tragic” imagination of suicide formed in nineteenth-century European psychiatry, as Ian Marsh describes it (Reference Marsh2013: 748). This is not to say that suicide was not medicalized in clinical settings in Thrace, but rather that its medicalization had cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions that registered as collective rather than individual.

In Thrace, the much higher rate of suicide among Gypsies than in other minority communities or in the Greek-speaking population enabled a cultural diagnosis of the community itself as pathogenic. In the local clinical imagination, this differential in suicide rates cordoned Gypsy culture off from Greek culture, in which, as noted above, suicide has long been understood as a “taboo” subject due to its contaminating stigma. In media coverage of the current crisis, that stigma—crystallized in the proscription on suicide by the Greek Orthodox Church and its refusal of burial rites to suicides—has been marshaled to explain the historically low suicide rate in Greece, repeatedly touted as the lowest in Europe before the crisis (Economist 2013). According to Eleni Bekiari, a psychiatrist with Klimaka who pointed to the Church as the principal source of this stigma, “Many callers tell us that they plan to drive their car off a cliff or into a rock to make it seem like an accident so that their family and community will never know it was suicide” (Hadjimatheou Reference Hadjimatheou2011).Footnote ²³ From this perspective, only the extremity of financial devastation and spiritual despair caused by the crisis could overcome this stigma and the protective effect of close family ties—themselves now disintegrating under the pressure of poverty and unredeemable debt—to drive people to suicide in such high numbers and in public.

This idealized portrait of traditional Greek culture clearly diverges from the picture drawn by suicidal patients in Thrace, who experienced conditions of deprivation, isolation, and hopelessness that, even if imagined by clinicians as particular to Gypsy culture, were in fact diffused throughout the social body even during Greece's “boom” years. From a perspective grounded in Thrace, then, the national crisis beginning in 2008 did not mark a threshold of immiseration that tipped the Greek population toward suicide; rather, suicide would appear always to have inhabited the social, even if it left no trace in public discourse.

In her ethnography of heroin addiction in the Española Valley of New Mexico, Angela Garcia approaches this immanent sociality of suicide. Exploring the lives of several women who died, or almost died, from overdoses, Garcia discerns suicide, like addiction itself, in a regional history and geography of dispossession—in the devastating loss of land, legitimacy, and well-being in Hispano communities of the valley. She sees suicide in these communities as “a form of life,” as a set of “dependencies” or relationships among family members, and among individuals and pastoral or carceral institutions, as well as an “intensifie[r]” of those relationships (Reference Garcia2010: 150, 152, 155). In summoning affective and institutional care, she writes, suicide helps to “create the very social world” that would seem, from a Durkheimian point of view, to be merely “described” by it (ibid.: 155, 153). From this vantage, suicide appears as a social force in itself, not merely as an “effect or description” of morbid social relationships or of the absence of vital relationships (ibid.: 153). Garcia thus offers a way to understand suicide, in its relation to the social, in immanent rather than diagnostic terms.

This immanence of suicide in the social complicates any attribution of suicide to individual pathology, even if an irreducible individuality—understood as motive, disposition, or desire—persists in the act itself. In this light, turning from the clinic before the crisis back to the present, we can see great resonance where we might expect radical discontinuity. The patients I knew in Thrace in the early 2000s gave the same explanations of their own suicidality, and the suicidality of their relatives and neighbors, that have come to seem self-evident in the public discourse on suicide since the crisis: poverty, too much work (as unpaid labor) or too little work (as unemployment), hopelessness, all articulated around the social as shared conditions of life. In this sense, explanations of suicide in Greece by way of the crisis re-contextualize the clinic as an explanatory frame for the suicidality of psychiatric patients. For those patients, too, suicide can be seen as an immanent form of sociality in their communities, where it structured and produced relationships among family members, friends, and neighbors, not to mention among patients and therapists. The attributions of suicide to shared social conditions made by these patients, which are diagnoses in their own right, are best understood, I think, not as transparent and authoritative explanations, but rather as artifacts of the search for explanation in which these patients were engaged alongside their therapists. Nevertheless, those attributions make visible a continuity rather than a radical shift in social conditions between Thrace before the crisis and the rest of Greece since the crisis. In accounting for suicide in Greece, the line to be drawn between these locales and periods of time points not to social conditions, but to publicity itself.