Ερμηνείες θανάτου, αφηγήσεις ζωής: η κοινωνική πρακτική της αυτοκτονίας στη μετεμφυλιακή Ελλάδα 1949-1967 ; Ιnterpretations of death, narratives of life: the social practice of suicide in post-civil war Greece 1949-1967

In the present PhD thesis suicide is treated as a social phenomenon with multiple contexts and implications. More specifically, suicide is evaluated as a sociological and historiographical category of analysis, since through the discourses related to suicides emerge social values, social identities, political relations and powers, images and social snapshots of the investigated period, in the present research of post-war Greece. Suicide is a "discourse" and social practice of everyday people, as it brings to the surface their anxieties, their social relationships, their desires, their frustrations. Through the analysis of suicide, social practices and cultural meanings, political dimensions and economic parameters, disciplines and resistance to the multiple levels of power unfold. The present study of suicide maps the experiences of "ordinary people" in the given historical context, the way they interpreted their experiences, their actions, illuminating aspects of the situations that pushed them to choose suicide instead of tolerance or adaptation. In other words, it investigates the social interventions that triggered the suicidal practice. Although the predominant discourse on suicide is the individual deviation in the field of psychopathology, the dissertation argues that interpretations of suicide recommend and draw on social meanings, beliefs and stereotypes, articulate discourses that undermine social practices and encircle the action of social subjects. After all, the thesis claims that the identification of suicide with psychiatric deviation is sampled to some extent by the intention to manipulate the social and political repercussions of suicide. At the same time, he normalizes and devalues the speech of the person who committed suicide in order to manage him, dismissing in the social margin any social message he projects with his suicide, characterizing him as a "sufferer" of a psychiatric disorder, who has no individual will and choice. In the present thesis suicidal behaviors are not considered as an ...