ABSTRACT
This chapter employs three counterdiscourses to analyze U.S. state and professional efforts toward suicide prevention through cross cultural international comparisons. More specific, this analysis is taken up via “data-driven” policy making as evidenced in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent Suicide (1999) and the British Secretary of State for Health’s Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation (1999). Against a backdrop of failed state and national policy, the authors offer a discussion of school-based educators who have developed and written about their own experiences with intervention and prevention strategies. The authors discuss the gap between state reasoning and narratives of those who characterize suicide as unpredictable and therefore in excess of reason. Autobiography, Foucaldian analysis, and queer theory are offered as possible alternatives to the narrow instrumental privileged in U.S. and British suicide reduction efforts. Finally, the ongoing use of technically inclined strategies in the face of their failure to produce desired results, even by their own measure of success, is addressed within a context of a youth culture in crisis and of the needs of nation-states for a productive and flexible population amid advancing global capitalism.
