Tres(louca)dos atos? Os discursos sobre os suicídios no município de Ouro Branco/RN (1942 a 1976).

Abstract

This work deals with a study about the police processes that investigated suicide practices in the municipality of Ouro Branco, in the State of Rio Grande do Norte, from 1942 to 1976. In all, eight cases were identified as sources of research, as well as death records for the construction of a table with suicide rates in the municipality. Michel Foucault's discursive analysis was used as a theoretical-methodological reference to understand the construction of several discourses on suicides, these medical, legal, religious or ordinary, who treated the act as something reprehensible. Concepts such as Foucault's discourse, power and knowledge were addressed to explain the statements in the police processes, as well as identity and difference of Stuart Hall in the relation of suicides with the other subjects involved in these plots. The main motivation for justifying suicides was mental illness. However, other motivations that supposedly justified suicidal acts differed from pathologies such as debt, other illnesses, forbidden loves. However, the vocabularies used by the others involved in the processes led to a proximity to the relation suicide / mental illness, without, however, a proven diagnosis of such disorders. Thus, this study sought to deconstruct the predominant view that associated suicide and pathology. Through the documentation consulted and articulated the problematic, this research was divided in three chapters titled: First sinister: of the motivations to kill itself; Second sinister: the speeches about the suicidal; Third sinister: with faith, with law, with cure and without suicide. It was thus sought to understand the acts of suicides through certain discourses in a specific spatiality of Seridó potiguar.