Taboo status of suicide

denhaagenite wrote: »

Was just reading the news and came across this:

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/hundreds-expected-at-removal-of-cathriona-white-in-tipperary-tonight-699860.html

So despite the fact that in all of the campaigns we're urged to talk about it, a suicide as high profile and widely reported as this is written off as a "sudden death"?? This is completely outrageous. How can we expect people to not be ashamed of this if it can't even be commented on publicly?

I don't think there really is a 'taboo' regards talking about suicide, that seems more like an oft repeated meme that has no basis in reality, there's no shortage of public debate, it's regularly mentioned on the airwaves and debated here when it hits the papers, there are school talks and national suicide prevention days etc.
The shortage it seems to me isn't talk, it's properly funded services, good luck to anybody that requires psychiatric help outside HSE office hours. If it wasn't for charities like Pieta House or the Samaratins there would be nothing but talk at all.
You know what is isn't ever spoken about though? Fixing some of the underlying causes of poor mental health amongst vulnerable groups. Of course social isolation, financial ruin, drug abuse and the disappearance of communities are issue for which there aren't overnight or inexpensive fixes and if it isn't revenue generating then the government has little interest in taking a broader look at what kind of society we are building. In many ways it suits the government to keep perpetrating the myth that we 'need to talk more about suicide' because talk is cheap and action is expensive.

As for the 'sudden death' reporting, the cause of death is up to the corronor to report, not the newspapers.

denhaagenite wrote: »

Was just reading the news and came across this:

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/hundreds-expected-at-removal-of-cathriona-white-in-tipperary-tonight-699860.html

So despite the fact that in all of the campaigns we're urged to talk about it, a suicide as high profile and widely reported as this is written off as a "sudden death"?? This is completely outrageous. How can we expect people to not be ashamed of this if it can't even be commented on publicly?

The wording is deliberate. They don't have results from the autopsy yet so it cant be confirmed as a suicide, no matter how obvious. When you're talking about a suicide that involved an overdose, autopsy results can take 6-8 weeks.

This sorta breaks down into two questions:

DOES Ireland have a serious problem with suicide?
IS there a culture of shame around it?

The first can be answered more easily than the second, although even that has some issues with it. In 2015 so far, Ireland ranks 59th in the world (out of 170 countries with data), same level as Madagascar. Our nearest neighbour, the UK is ranked 107th. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)

Looking at the numbers a bit more closely, particularly in the case of children and "youths" - below the age of 25. Ireland has the highest rate of young female suicides in the EU, and the second highest rate of young male suicides (just below Lithuania). This is from a European survey of EU countries based on figures between 2009-2012 (http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ireland-has-exceptionally-high-rates-of-suicide-1.1732791)

PISA lists Irish suicides rates has having doubled between 1987 and 1997, and levelling off since then. I'll come back to that point later.

Alright, so I think if we take the above numbers as accurate or even, as is not unlikely, somewhat under-reported across the field, we can say that Ireland has a problem with suicide.

So, second question, is there a culture of shame around it?
This is the question that I can't answer with figures, I can only make assumptions. That PISA quote, about suicide rates having doubled. Now, during that period, the country underwent a huge upheaval, socially, religiously, culturally and financially. It quite simply was not the same country in 1997 as it was in 1987. So, it is not impossible that suicide rates really -did- double. However, and this is based on purely anecdotal evidence, people -did not talk- about suicide. If it could be possibly covered over, it was; accident, etc. No doubt Catholic principles played a large part in this.

So, say the sudden, cataclysmic societal upheaval of the youth of Ireland moving away from their religious roots played a part in this, very abruptly shedding most of the mores (or assuming they did) of their more religious parents? Reporting of suicides where they might not have been previously reported likely would have gone up. But we still have some internalised issues, and a large population of older people who did grow up in a time where mental health and suicide just wasn't talked about. So maybe there still is some shame to it, be it straight-forwardly religious from the older people and/or a mix of more modern feelings of "giving up", etc., perhaps also based in some unadmitted religious mores from upbringing. There's a reason we still have a bit of a reputation for being sexually repressed too!

Alcoholism is also another factor, but I won't delve into it too much, since this is already turning into an essay.

Overall, I'm not claiming to be right or even on the right track, but I think these are points worth considering in any debate on Irish suicide rates.

Samaris wrote: »

This sorta breaks down into two questions:

DOES Ireland have a serious problem with suicide?
IS there a culture of shame around it?

...

Looking at the numbers a bit more closely, particularly in the case of children and "youths" - below the age of 25. Ireland has the highest rate of young female suicides in the EU, and the second highest rate of young male suicides (just below Lithuania). This is from a European survey of EU countries based on figures between 2009-2012 (http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ireland-has-exceptionally-high-rates-of-suicide-1.1732791)

...

Overall, I'm not claiming to be right or even on the right track, but I think these are points worth considering in any debate on Irish suicide rates.

I think you're on the right track alright, and the piece of your post I highlighted there in bold is often one that adults when we talk about suicide, seem to ignore, and it's even happened in this thread earlier. I don't want to keep harping on about it but when adults have this impression of "sure they're only kids, what do they know about suicide?", and the fact of the matter is that they know a frightening amount about suicide and suicidal ideation, due to the influence among young people of the internet and social media.

Suicide was decriminalised in 1993, so these teenagers we're seeing now, have never grown up with, nor experienced the stigma surrounding suicide that there was pre-1993, pre-1997 and even at a push I'd say pre-2007, because yes, there are people as young as 8 and 9 who are engaging in self-harming behaviour and suicidal ideation. To say to these young people that they know nothing and how could they know anything about suicide, self-harm, suicidal ideation and even depression and ill mental health, is actually dismissive, and if I'm to be perfectly honest, it perpetuates the ignorance that adults have in failing to recognise the symptoms of suicidal ideation and ill mental health among young people. They do know what they're talking about, and they're talking about themselves, but if we're too busy telling them "shush, the adults are talking, you don't know what you're talking about", that's when they feel ignored and isolated and they withdraw further from society and into the online community that makes them feel like their thinking and their behaviour is normal, completely rational, and therefore there is no shame or stigma attached.

I don't think that suicide should ever be talked about in society the way we talk about other subjects, as it doesn't prevent suicide. What does prevent suicide is early intervention and addressing mental health issues as early as possible, and the government are going some way towards that with a new initiative in Irish primary schools aimed at promoting better mental health among children, because that's where it starts, with children, as children -


WELL-BEING IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

denhaagenite wrote: »

You are harping on about it though. Nobody here said that he shouldn't or didn't know anything about it because he was a child. He just didn't know anything about it full stop, why else would he do the TOTAL OPPOSITE of what advice suggests people should do in an attempt to be helpful? He and everyone else got really emotional because he was a terminal cancer sufferer and no other reason. He was emotional, God bless him.

With all due respect, unless you're a mind reader, you don't know how much he, or any other young person, knows about suicide, and if you aren't prepared to listen to what they are actually saying, then you're only making it very difficult on yourself first of all to understand their point of view from their perspective (not your perspective, but their perspective), then you're only going to make it more difficult for young people to talk about how they are actually feeling, before you write them off as 'emotional' because of what you think may be the most obvious reason they are... 'emotional'. If you listen to them, you'll gain a better understanding of where they're coming from, rather than expect they should understand where you're coming from instead.

I'm 38 years of age, and it takes listening to a 16 year old to help me articulate my own thoughts in my own head, better than listening to any amount of adults who spent years talking over my head because they thought they knew my own mind and they knew me better than I know myself, and so they weren't prepared to listen and didn't want to listen, and that IMO, needs to stop. We need to start listening to young people instead of telling them what we think they do, or don't know, about themselves.

Boring username wrote: »

Realistically, what would you prefer someone said to a suicidal person?

What people need to hear varies from person to person.

But often it's a simple acknowledgement of the person themselves, of their feelings and their existence.

"Your mother will never recover if you kill yourself", is not acknowledging the person themselves. You're defining their mother's feelings as being more important than the suicidal person's existence. Rather than worrying about the suicidal person, you're worrying about their mother. Effectively confirming their belief that nobody cares about them at all and their feelings don't matter.

Imagine a student being told, "Your mother will be very disappointed if you do arts rather than law". They don't hear, "Your mother loves you and wants what's best for you". They hear, "Put your mother's feelings above your own and make her happy even if it makes you unhappy".

That's exactly what a suicidal person hears when you tell them that their death will make other people sad; "Cop onto yourself and think of others".

sashafierce wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

There are, but depression is one of the few things we know to be strongly linked to suicide and suicidal ideation. So it makes sense to start there.

The whole area is still very underresearched for various reasons, not least because you can't ask a dead person what was going through their mind when they killed themselves.