Mind Moves:The Easter story of the Christian tradition contains powerful imagery. It is also a story that seems to engage people in a particularly human way, writes Marie Murray
For regardless of the perspective from which one may interact with it, it is a story that portrays the entire gamut of human emotions and human behaviours.
One of the most powerful images and metaphors of distress that the story provides is that of the Garden of Gethsemane, for it is an image of mental agony.
This "agony in the garden" shows a young man, who was also divine, alone at night in a garden, reduced to terror at the prospect of what lay ahead of him.
The image says that mental agony can assail anyone. It is often appropriated by people to convey the depths of their own isolation, their sense of dread and of despair.
Gethsemane encapsulates the agony people feel when the present is unbearable and the future unendurable, and they have felt unable to survive the suffering it will entail.
This is the face of depression at its most profound, with acute helplessness, no belief in support from others, when friends seem to be absent or not to care, when enemies gather, when everything appears to be hopeless, when it seems that no intervention can remove the inevitable.
The dark night of the soul, the agony of mental distress when life asks more of someone than they believe they have the capacity to survive is contained in the Gethsemane image.
It is an image also of loneliness, of isolation and of the solitary experience of suffering.
The pictures of Gethsemane are also the image of young male death, the tragedy of the death of a man in the prime of life and a reminder of our particularly chilling statistics on male suicide in this country.
Even as these words are being read, there are people in their own Gethsemane and those who may not manage to survive that experience.
There are people "carrying their cross," the burden that has been placed on their shoulders. They often carry that cross alone.
There may be the occasional reprieve, the person who emerges from the crowd to help, the promise of help, their names placed on a waiting list for help, but that is often too late and not enough.
There are many onlookers to suffering. The health services in this country allow too many people, who need just a little timely help, to suffer needlessly, to endure mental distress unnecessarily, to carry heavy crosses alone and to collapse under the weight of the stress of doing so.
They also place staff working in the health services in the position of witnessing what they cannot alleviate, on the sidelines of suffering, seeing situations that have their own inevitable consequences.
From the Easter images, there also emerges the potent picture of the love of a mother for her son, encompassing the agony of all women who have witnessed their sons' distress.
The image of the women at the foot of the cross is a metaphor for all the mothers whose sons need help, who have felt powerless, who have been unable to alter their sons' suffering.
They are women exhausted, crumpled at the foot of a cross because help has not been forthcoming. They are silent.
They are always there. They persist to the last moment and beyond. From generation to generation women have loved their sons, suffered when they suffered, stood by them when in need.
They have accompanied them since childhood, sat with them in their darkest hours and grieved for them if tragically they have lost them to death. The Easter images also belong to them.
When their sons have been depressed, they have sought help and have wept when that help was not forthcoming. They have watched the Pontius Pilots of current times renege on responsibility, wash their hands of them, send them away and in so doing send their sons to face what could have been prevented.
Easter may be over but the Easter story is not. It continues in current form to remind us that doing nothing brings tragedy.
The people that emerge from the Easter story are distinguishable by their responses to the events at that time. All human life is there: anguish, anger, fear, betrayal, loss, death, duty, kindness, belief, disbelief, despair and hope. The events in the Easter story follow an inevitable and dreadful sequence.
Yet it is a story that eventually ends in triumph because suffering is overcome. The question for us at this time is how is suffering to be overcome today?
Clinicians working in the area of mental distress know what is required. The expertise is there. The commitment is there. The services are not. Access to them is unwieldy, inequitable and often dependent on where one lives rather than on what one needs, or on crisis rather than early intervention.
Adolescent services have been conspicuous by how limited they are. Adult males need help. Now.
• Clinical psychologist Marie Murrayis Director of student counselling at UCD.