THE PREVALENCE of suicide is the unspoken social phenomenon of our day. It has touched somebody we know and yet it is something we very rarely speak about in public. More people died from suicide in this State last year than from road traffic crashes.
Suicide is a convergence of troubled strands: there may be relationship problems, financial pressures, drug or alcohol abuse or an undiagnosed mental-health problem. But there are always unanswered, or unanswerable, questions. Could the death have been avoided? Were there sufficient warning signs that a person was going to take his or her own life? What could possibly drive a person to feel life is so unbearable that they would want to leave it?
For some health experts the statistics on suicide can be like discovering the wreckage of a plane crash without finding the black box. Statistics can tell you how a person died, the method used and whether the person was young, older, middle-aged. But they do not provide a window into those troubled lives. Without a kind of psychological autopsy, which is impossible after the event, we remain in the dark.
As in Ireland, suicide rates across much of the world have increased by about 60 per cent over the past half century. What is new in Ireland is the scale and speed of the increase. Last year 527 people died in the State by suicide, an extraordinary increase of almost 25 per cent in a single year. Many experts believe the real number is significantly higher but is under-reported. In addition, at least 11,000 people were admitted to hospital for harming themselves.
The Irish Timeshas spoken to the families, friends and survivors of suicide, without intruding on their lives. They want to share their stories. They are to be commended for their courage in engaging in a public debate.
Each story is different: each person faced a unique set of circumstances and revealed his or her distress in different ways. What is the same, however, is the way the legacy of suicide has frightened, bewildered and confused families and friends.
Hiding from suicide is not the answer, and it hasn’t served us well in the past. It is time to learn more about this problem.
Stories of Suicide, a new series of articles by Carl O’Brien, begins in Weekend Review today and runs in the Opinion & Analysis pages throughout next week.
