Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v9.3) © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press MIKKO MYLLYKANGAS AND KATARIINA PARHI MIKKO MYLLYKANGAS AND KATARIINA PARHI THE UNJUSTIFIED EMOTIONS: CHILD SUICIDE IN THE FINNISH PSYCHIATRY FROM THE 1930S UNTIL THE 1970S I n the 1910s, an adolescent at a Finnish psychiatric polyclinic met the psy- chiatrist on duty. She said she had been sick since childhood, and “when she was eight or nine, she wrote a suicide note and went to a barn where she planned to hang herself,” but remembered her mom saying that “those who kill themselves go to hell.” That thought prevented the suicide. 1 Such notions of suicidal behavior were rare in Finnish psychiatry at the time. Child suicide, something that society today sees as incomprehensible and shocking, had not yet been medicalized. This changed when the influence of German child suicide research reached Finland. This article examines the history of child suicides in the context of child psychiatry in Finland between the 1930s and the early 1970s. Like adult suicide during the nineteenth century, child suicide was in the process of medicaliza- tion by the early twentieth century. 2 While giving an outline of theories related to suicidal children, this article also outlines the conceptions related to, in particular, the normal and abnormal emotional life of children in the emerg- ing child psychiatric discourse. This article contributes to the historiography of emotions by analyzing historical conceptions of emotional norms and rules within the nascent field of child psychiatry. Changes in the thinking about children as emotional beings are essential in understanding the field’s develop- ment. However, we are not making any claims about the nature of emotions either as universal or as social constructions since our focus in this article is on the conceptualization of children’s emotions by professionals attempting to understand and categorize child suicides. 3 The article is based primarily on scientific journals and on medical records of child patients in the three major Finnish mental hospitals between the 1930s and the 1960s. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 9, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 489-508 (article). Published by Johns Hopkins University Press