Ian Marsh is a university professor and researcher in the UK, and has worked in the British National Health Service (NHS) on "suicide prevention". He is therefore considered a "special intellectual", according to Michel Foucault's definition, whose theoretical tools Marsh used in his most important work titled "Suicide: Foucault, history and truth".
With the essay "The uses of history in the reconstruction of modern suicide", Marsh examines the role played by medical scientific discourse (and later the so-called psych-discourses) in the "construction" of modern suicide during modernity, and thus the ability of writing the history of these discourses in the "reconstruction" of medicalized suicide as it emerged in the 19th century, as well as the "regime of truth" that constitutes its epistemological and political foundation.