The Social Engineering of Suicide

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, suicide is often discussed in relation to the concept of risk. According to psychiatric understanding of suicide, the risk of suicide is increased under certain circumstances and in connection to mental disorders. Thinking of suicide in terms of risk factors has a historical background in the rise of psychiatric epidemiology during decades after the Second World War. In the case of Finland, the emergence of psychiatric epidemiology of suicide in the 1960s and 1970s also coincides with the building of a welfare state through active use of social planning. In this article, the author examines how social engineering thinking, criticism of biologically oriented psychiatry, and psychiatric epidemiology changed the way how suicide was perceived in the discourse of psychiatry.