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(Sort Of) Poison Pen
Posted by
Gisèle
,
02 August 2012
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I always thought people that write into newspapers were a little strange or needed more to do.
So I'm feeling a little chastened because I did exactly that just now. I couldn't help it. There was a length opinion piece in today's newspaper about suicide which made me quite angry. Angry enough to thrash away at my keyboard and send in this:
As a survivor of three very real and very determined suicide attempts, it was with interest that I read Michael Short’s contribution to The Age (02/08/12). I suspect, given his emphasis on ‘young people’, he wasn’t talking either to my now 37 year old self or my then 32-year old self whose attempted suicide was much like that almost exactly 16 years earlier. So why the emphasis on youth suicide?
Quite aside from ignoring the obvious certainty that death makes a mess of the living at any age, does it presume that suicide at a more tender age is less of a reasoned choice, therefore more of a tragedy? It could be because we can’t help it. We tend to incrementalise tragedy and familiar sentiments such as “She had so much life to live” aren’t merely convenient refrains. It’s why we should also strive for it not to make a difference. The victims of adult suicide all too often include their children.
I also do not share Short’s conviction that suicide is a “step….they do not fully comprehend and one often taken in a fog of mental health issues.” We’re talking about the last, grievous act of a heart in so many ways already dead, no? One therefore wonders how mental health could not be involved. And it’s all to easy to assume the young understand themselves less merely for being young. I can say with certainty I better understand the choice I made at 16, when I was 16, than any made before or since.
We will always struggle to avert suicide if we continue to wait for people to be suicidal before we do anything. True, often it’s all we can do. All we do do. To be heard, one has to be saying something. Short alludes to drugs and alcohol and all too often it’s these things that are doing the talking. Or merely creating a din. But we must see through the noise and not stop at just improving services for those that need it. We need to be so much better as a community. Instead, we wait and we wait and we lament.
What of the wider world? Suicidal ideation isn’t in our DNA but pretending the problem isn’t wider than the individual seems to be. Behavioural excess tends to follow the damage already done so while we’re cynically taxing alcohol or creating websites or resourcing crisis centres or not, what are we doing about broken homes? What are we doing about the wider family that wrings it hands and wonders if it’s all too hard? Or our peers made hostile by guilt or apprenhension? What are we doing about the Catholic and other churches? Or government similarly stuck staring at it’s own self-image?
If we are to get serious about this problem, then it will need a deeper, wider view all the way back to hypocrisy. Youth isn’t so callow that it can’t see the world around it and decide, perhaps fatally, that it isn’t for me. We can be seduced by the way it should be and thusly assassinated by the way it is. Changing that will of course be hard. It will be hard because it asks those who problem it isn’t to overcome that and accept that it is.
It's too late now but I hope they don't print it. I'm just happy I have my blog here when I can vent my anger, tidy myself up a bit, and get back to living.
So I'm feeling a little chastened because I did exactly that just now. I couldn't help it. There was a length opinion piece in today's newspaper about suicide which made me quite angry. Angry enough to thrash away at my keyboard and send in this:
As a survivor of three very real and very determined suicide attempts, it was with interest that I read Michael Short’s contribution to The Age (02/08/12). I suspect, given his emphasis on ‘young people’, he wasn’t talking either to my now 37 year old self or my then 32-year old self whose attempted suicide was much like that almost exactly 16 years earlier. So why the emphasis on youth suicide?
Quite aside from ignoring the obvious certainty that death makes a mess of the living at any age, does it presume that suicide at a more tender age is less of a reasoned choice, therefore more of a tragedy? It could be because we can’t help it. We tend to incrementalise tragedy and familiar sentiments such as “She had so much life to live” aren’t merely convenient refrains. It’s why we should also strive for it not to make a difference. The victims of adult suicide all too often include their children.
I also do not share Short’s conviction that suicide is a “step….they do not fully comprehend and one often taken in a fog of mental health issues.” We’re talking about the last, grievous act of a heart in so many ways already dead, no? One therefore wonders how mental health could not be involved. And it’s all to easy to assume the young understand themselves less merely for being young. I can say with certainty I better understand the choice I made at 16, when I was 16, than any made before or since.
We will always struggle to avert suicide if we continue to wait for people to be suicidal before we do anything. True, often it’s all we can do. All we do do. To be heard, one has to be saying something. Short alludes to drugs and alcohol and all too often it’s these things that are doing the talking. Or merely creating a din. But we must see through the noise and not stop at just improving services for those that need it. We need to be so much better as a community. Instead, we wait and we wait and we lament.
What of the wider world? Suicidal ideation isn’t in our DNA but pretending the problem isn’t wider than the individual seems to be. Behavioural excess tends to follow the damage already done so while we’re cynically taxing alcohol or creating websites or resourcing crisis centres or not, what are we doing about broken homes? What are we doing about the wider family that wrings it hands and wonders if it’s all too hard? Or our peers made hostile by guilt or apprenhension? What are we doing about the Catholic and other churches? Or government similarly stuck staring at it’s own self-image?
If we are to get serious about this problem, then it will need a deeper, wider view all the way back to hypocrisy. Youth isn’t so callow that it can’t see the world around it and decide, perhaps fatally, that it isn’t for me. We can be seduced by the way it should be and thusly assassinated by the way it is. Changing that will of course be hard. It will be hard because it asks those who problem it isn’t to overcome that and accept that it is.
* * *
It's too late now but I hope they don't print it. I'm just happy I have my blog here when I can vent my anger, tidy myself up a bit, and get back to living.
- chucapabra likes this
