Last Wednesday, this newspaper carried perhaps the best report on the suicide issue I have read in a decade, writes John Waters.
Daniel Attwood's report, "Suicides may be hidden in road crashes", - on, of all places, the front page of the motoring supplement - was a study in clarity on an issue generally characterised by journalistic and official evasion. Dr John Connolly, secretary of the Irish Association of Suicidologists and a consultant psychiatrist at the Western Health Board, was quoted as speculating that perhaps 6 per cent of fatal single-vehicle accidents may be hidden suicides. Paul O'Hare, a spokesman for the Samaritans, confirmed that his organisation received calls from people expressing an intention to kill themselves in this way. An international study, conducted by Australia's Monash University, was cited as finding that up to 7 per cent of such deaths may be suicides.
It was estimated that perhaps 90 per cent of hidden suicides using this method are by young men. This consolidates the already stark statistics indicating that male suicides outnumber female by a factor of 10 or 11 to one.
I have observed to the point of tedium that if this ratio were reversed, suicide would be considered the most urgent problem of the age. And yet, after nearly 20 years of high visibility, the epidemic of male suicide is no closer to achieving priority status than it was when I first wrote about it in 1990.
On the contrary, every attempt is made to elide the nature of the problem. In the recent exchange of correspondence on the letters page opposite, for example, it was noticeable that the euphemism "youth suicide" has now become fashionable as a way of avoiding an accurate definition of the problem. The male dimension is mentioned only where there is an opportunity for some disparaging reference to "laddism" or some such nonsense. While each and every suicide is an appalling catastrophe for those intimately involved, it is clear that if male suicides were at the same level as female suicides there would not be a significant social problem. The avoidance arises from the central ideological belief of this society that only females suffer discrimination, oppression or disadvantage. To state the suicide problem openly would be to place a question mark over this belief.
Suicide has always been the subject of taboo and what is now fashionably called denial. There is, in truth, an argument for the restoration of the taboo, which acted as a deterrent to the would-be suicide by ensuring that the act was devoid of any possibility of glamour or heroism. There is also, from a social viewpoint, something to be said for the Catholic idea that self-killing is a mortal sin, rendering the victim liable to eternal punishment.
With the decline in belief in eternal damnation, society's focus has shifted to easing the burden of pain and guilt on the bereaved. This is decent and admirable. Less virtuous, however, is the extension of this compassionate evasion to society as a whole. It is right that no-one should take the blame for another's decision, but wrong that society should be enabled to shrug off responsibility for a clear, consistent social pattern established over many years, simply because the facts are inconvenient to its beliefs.
Recently, as part of escalating attempts to find a way of squaring the circle, there has been a tendency to conflate two discrete phenomena: suicide and what is called parasuicide, i.e. the acting out of a suicide attempt as a "cry for help". Because parasuicide is largely a female phenomenon, this conflation creates a superficial perception of statistical equivalence, and therefore allows the male dimension of actual suicide to be obscured. The argument is sometimes even couched in terms that men, by virtue of their intrinsically violent natures, are more efficient at finishing themselves off.
Contrary to the propaganda, the issue with regard to male choice of methodology is not "violence" but finality. It is obvious that the explanation for the disparity between the behaviour of men and women in this respect has to do with the relative levels of support and genuine compassion extended in this society on the basis of sex. Men, in the event that they encounter emotional or psychological difficulties, do not expect a hearing. Check your telephone directory and you will find a host of support organisations under "Women". In the current Dublin directory there is only one organisation listed as offering assistance to men: Men Overcoming Violence, an association of recovering wife-beaters who seek to offload responsibility for their actions on to men in general.
It is unsurprising then, that men, in approaching the project of killing themselves, rarely opt for the "cry for help". Even in the depths of despair, they sense that a man crying for anything will cause this society to squirm in embarrassment. And perhaps the reason some men are opting to conceal their suicides in road accident statistics is that, far from desiring to make a statement of accusation, they wish merely to leave an unhelpful world in peace.