Caste and Causality in Development Discourses on Suicides in Tharparkar, Pakistan

While my PhD fieldwork was interested in the psy-logics and discourses surrounding development programmes targeting suicide prevention, many of my interlocutors wanted me to research on a completely different question of ‘why people were taking their own lives?’. The question of causality is the most asked one by health actors and public in Sindh, and the one most attempted to answer. Most suicides reported in Tharparkar, the district reporting highest number of suicides in Pakistan, are seemingly amongst the scheduled-caste Hindu women. This has led to the public discourse often answering the question of ‘why’ with responses steeped in cultural determinism–holding individuals rather than structures responsible for poor quality of life–such as ‘lack of awareness about mental health’, 'lower rate of education’, and ‘religious predisposition to self-immolation’.

This paper reflects on these causal explanations offered by health actors towards the suicides in Tharparkar, Pakistan, to investigate how caste and gender holds a central space in understandings of poor mental health and suicides (itself a tenuous link). Drawing on interviews and documents from 11-month fieldwork in Sindh, Pakistan, I argue the discourses around causality of suicides evoke caste and gender of Thari Hindu communities to push the accountability from structures to individual and from the political sphere to the personal through usage of language such as ‘awareness’ and ‘predisposition’.

Drawing on China Mills’ work on problematisation of poverty through psychiatrisation, I analyse how, in the case of Tharparkar, poverty and caste both are problematised, and explanations and interventions are targeted ‘at the level of the individual psyche rather than on the structural landscapes that produce and sustain poverty/caste' (2015:4). In doing so, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the discussions of causality amongst health actors working on suicide prevention in Tharparkar seek to individualise and, in turn, depoliticise mental health.