RITE AND REASON: Rapid social change has brought social fragmentation, misery and a rising suicide rate, and we must deal with this, argues Patricia Casey
Ireland has changed dramatically over the past 15 years. In addition we have been presented with an Ireland of the past that was harsh and repressive, that was in thrall to the Catholic Church and where difference evoked condemnation. Little wonder that we should wish to escape from such bleakness to an outward-looking, secular and open society.
What many commentators failed to recognise or even avoided acknowledging was that humans need stability and security. We need a degree of predictability so that we can make sense of our world. We need clear boundaries, delineating acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and we need a source of morality - some agency, usually religion, but not always, to guide us.
There are clear indicators that many of the ideals provided in the 1970s and 1980s of a better society have not been realised and that there have been human casualties and a high price to pay for arriving at where we are today.
Lawlessness may not be an accurate description of the situation in Ireland with regard to crime but there are worrying trends that suggest the civic order is in disarray.
One of the most accurate barometers of the social well-being of a nation is its suicide rate.
This goes back to the work of Emile Durkheim who, in 1897, showed that the values of society influenced the suicide rate. For humans to be happy, he said, it was necessary that their unlimited needs and aspirations be constrained since if they are not, humans will be condemned to perpetual misery and ultimately suicide is the consequence.
Modern researchers speak of social fragmentation and its parameters include the divorce rate, the numbers living in rented accommodation, abstention from voting, single-person households and mobility in the previous year. A study in the British Medical Journal in October 1999 demonstrated that for Britain there was a close association between the social fragmentation score and the suicide rate.
In Ireland there has been a four-fold increase in suicide since 1976, a time when there has been dramatic social change - changes that social researchers say are indicative of social fragmentation or anomie.
For instance, the proportion of young people in our population has risen sharply; the numbers living in single households has increased, our involvement in the electoral process or in organised religion has declined and mobility has increased.
I believe that those who die by suicide personify the casualties of unfettered social change. The pace of change, being much faster here, has increased the rate among our young people as compared to other European countries.
In the past 14 years there have been huge shifts in our attitudes to alcohol. Combined with more disposable income, our liberal, free-market values have catapulted Irish young people to the drinking pedestals of Europe. The human cost rests in the 300-fold increase in teenagers being treated for alcohol-related disorders in our psychiatric hospitals.
The per capita consumption of alcohol has increased by 41 per cent in the 10 years to 2000 and the figures for 2001 show that this has now reached 45 per cent. If the proven connection between high consumption and dependance, where alcohol is concerned, holds true, then I have no reason to doubt other than we are on the brink of a national alcohol-related cataclysm.
If the forecast holds true, suicide will continue to increase due to the impulse-inducing properties and depressant effects of alcohol on the young brain. Other possibilities also exist, including increasing absenteeism, violence - both in the home and directed towards others - and road deaths.
Meanwhile, parents have been disenfranchised, or we have disenfranchised ourselves? (The latter I think.)
Two-parent career families, working long hours, having less time with children and experiencing increasing levels of marital break-up, have abrogated responsibility for their children to schools - not just for the academic side of their education but also their personal development.
The result is that parents are increasingly removed from their children and their needs - the generation gap that the 1960s generation hoped forever to avoid.
As a nation we must begin by acknowledging that the dream has failed. There is a vacuum in values that is not being filled by anything at present. The consequence is devastating - casualties to drugs and violence, to loneliness, to suicide and to alcohol.
Our society does not need to fragment but the task of preventing it is daunting and for the foreseeable future the casualties will continue.
Prof Patricia Casey works at the department of psychiatry in Dublin's Mater Hospital. This is an edited version of an address she gave last Tuesday at the Forum for a Better Ireland in Dublin, organised by the Power to Change campaign.