ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how people in villages, courts and clinics in Madampe described suicide there and suicide here. The kinds of problems that people said caused Sri Lanka's suicide crisis were not considered endemic to Madampe, and neither were the kinds of people found there found here, both of which meant that Madampe was largely untroubled by high rates of suicidal behavior. The chapter focuses on one subtle but far-reaching difference between how people spoke about suicide there and suicide here. The ambiguities of suicidal language and practice and the relationships among suicide, people and place of how people narrated suicide here and how they threatened and attempted self-harm and self-inflicted death as Madampe people raise huge challenges in the conceptualisation and study of those behaviors. The high rate of suicide in the Tamil community was directly attributed to the oppression Tamil people have suffered at the hands of the Sri Lankan government.
