Ian Marsh is a university professor and researcher in Britain, having worked in the British National Health Service (NHS) on the topic of "suicide prevention." Therefore, he represents a form of "specialized intellectual," according to Michel Foucault's definition, whose theoretical tools Marsh utilized in his most significant work titled Suicide: Foucault, history and truth.
In the essay "The Uses of History in Deconstructing Modern Suicide," Marsh investigates the role played during modernity by the scientific discourse of medicine (and later by so-called psychological discourses) in the "construction" of modern suicide, and hence the possibility that the writing of the history of these discourses has in the "deconstruction" of medicalized suicide, as it emerged in the 19th century, as well as the "regime of truth" that constitutes its epistemological and political foundation.
In the essay "The Formation of Queer Suicide: The Problematic Figure of the 'Suicidal Gay' in Psychiatric Discourse," Marsh identifies the traces of the scientific discourses through which the figure of the "suicidal gay" was historically constructed within the context of psychiatric discourse and psychiatric practice in terms of "pathology." The way the dominant psychiatric discourse constructs and assigns meaning even today to the "suicidality" of members of the LGBTQI community highlights the inability of psychiatry to escape the dichotomy of "normal-pathological."
