In writing about the epidemic of male suicide, I repeatedly make the point that, if the male-female ratio was reversed, we would be taking a great deal more notice writes John Waters.
After reading the Catholic Bishops' document, Life is for Living: a Reflection on Suicide, I'd like to refine my point as follows: if the male-female ratio was reversed, Irish society would be seeking a sociological analysis, rather than discussing what is amiss with individual victims.
The bishops' document is welcome in terms of its tone. The sentiments expressed, and the language in which these are couched, is - albeit something of a dead language in modern Ireland - compassionate and gentle. The document is also important in that, in the first paragraph, it draws attention to the general nature of the problem: "it is notable that the ratio of young males to females who commit suicide is approximately four to one".
This is factually incorrect. The dramatic increase in suicide in recent times is largely due to the calamitous increase in suicide by young men. All other categories have remained constant, increased marginally or decreased. The bishops' figure reflects the overall male-female ratio in what would be an exceptional year. Among younger adults, the ratio has gone as high as 11 to one, and is consistently double what the bishops suggest. While each suicide is lamentable, overall Irish suicide rates are not exceptional, ranking us about 25th in the world. Where we top the league, consistently and by a considerable chalk, is in suicides by young men.
This consistent and clear-cut sociological pattern demands a sociological approach and needs to be analysed as the detrimental circumstances of other "minorities" are examined: on the assumption that people suffer because of how they are treated. Uniquely, problems afflicting men are analysed in terms of the defects in male psychology or the "toxic" elements of masculine culture.
The bishops make little attempt to explore the most obvious question: what so uniquely blights the lives of young Irish men? Bishops, of course, are not primarily concerned with social realities, but with human souls and individual human lives. Their words, drawing on Elijah and Isaiah, speak eloquently to the problem in the context of individual despair. But, if there is to be a point in their placing these thoughts in the public domain, it must surely relate to the perceptions of a collective intelligence in what we call society. To our great loss, the bishops' words about God's love and mercy read as archaic, perhaps even risible, in contemporary culture, in which God has been shunted into a siding, to be marshalled only in emergencies.
To the extent that they touch on social realities, the bishops are ad idem with virtually every "expert" and agency seeking to explore the phenomenon of suicide in Ireland. "Men, in particular", they write, "seem to be poor when it comes to talking out problems". This is a variation on the standard feminist psychobabble: men are not in touch with/cannot express their emotions, usually offered as part of an analysis of social reality defined by its seeking to elide the implications of inconvenient facts. This is unsurprising, since "social studies" are largely an offshoot of feminist agitation. Studies of the lives of men exist only to the extent that they support the dominant, so called "gender-based" analysis of society, which decrees that difficulties afflicting females are the fault of male-domination, and those afflicting men are likewise the consequence of this alleged domination. In other words, men are responsible for all problems experienced by women and for all problems experienced by themselves.
The bishops, rightly, call on us all to "join in the effort to make the causes of suicide more fully understood". The problem is that such initiatives would be governed by a prevailing ideology from which the bishops show no willingness to depart. To the extent that this analysis looks to the suicide issue at all, it assumes - after Tolstoy - that, whereas all happy individuals are similar, each unhappy individual is unhappy in his own way. While this approach may be helpful in respect of individual potential suicides, it steers away from sociological explanations, and so is helpful to the objectives of the prevailing ideology.
The statistics suggest that there are grossly exceptional circumstances in modern Irish culture bearing down on young men. What might these be? In seeking to identify a significant dislocation of Irish masculinity marking us out from other cultures, the eye is drawn to the role of the Catholic church in the post-Famine reconstruction, in which the Irish family was subjected to intense moral policing by clerics using the mother as the chief instrument of repression. In this, the man/father was marginalised within the family, and the society transformed into a matriarchy disguised as a patriarchy. If we wish to explore why young men are finding our society inhospitable, this would be a good place to begin. And Catholic bishops may have a greater social responsibility than is yet realised.