The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Garcia opens the chapter with three descriptions of suicide. The first is a firsthand account of a drug overdose, recounted by a patient who was saved at a hospital. She describes the experience as getting lost in a serene field of snow. The second account is from a medical professional, who describes the clinical details of drug overdose. The third is told from the perspective of a mother who finds her daughter after she overdosed. Garcia proposes that these three accounts reveal that suicide and overdose are as complex as life itself. She suggests that death by suicide has something to offer about the nature of life. While she discusses this idea, Garcia maintains awareness of her role as an anthropologist and the implications of what it means to discuss suicide as a type of life.

Drug-related suicide is a common part of the heroin addiction context, but it was not always viewed this way. A nurse and mental health professional tells Garcia that, for a long time, overdoses were almost always treated as accidental. After asking patients questions, the nurse soon learned that there was a story to tell about how patients used heroin and other hard drugs to die by suicide, even if they did not name their actions as “suicide” explicitly.