We don't seem to know how to talk about suicide

OPINION:THERE WAS something about the tragic death of Kate Fitzgerald (News Review, November 26th) – and in recent days of footballer Gary Speed – that unnerved many people, especially their peers, and left them at a loss for words.

We may see suicide as associated with people in dire straits or with people who struggle with traumatic histories without support and opportunities to make a life for themselves. But when someone such as Kate, who to her peers had “so much going for her”, and to her mental health professionals had so many “protective factors” in her life, her death by suicide came as an even more painful shock.

A colleague of mine, the same age as Kate, described how she read Peter Murtagh’s article in this newspaper last week and cried. “She was amazing,” she said. “I so admired her drive to achieve, her obsession with politics and her many achievements for someone so young. This was someone I would have liked to know, maybe even a potential role model.”

Reaction to her posting this article on Twitter and Facebook told her that Kate’s suicide struck a particular chord with her peers, probably because she and so many of her friends fitted the profile described by Kate’s parents. She also noticed tweets were being repeatedly circulated, but without comments.

“It was like everyone was in shock. They wanted to talk about it, but they didn’t know what to say.”

Different campaigns have encouraged us all to talk about our mental health, and especially about suicide, but we don’t seem to know how. We have no language. The shame that once censored these topics has turned to fear. We feel afraid because what we read and hear doesn’t make sense. We don’t know why it keeps happening. We wonder where it will happen next and we worry it could be to someone we know, or think we know.

I don’t know what happened in Kate’s life that resulted in her death. However it concerned me when I heard that this article was one of the most downloaded online articles this year and that it had obviously touched so many young people, who could identify with Kate as a gifted and beautiful young woman.

I think something Kate might have wanted was that we would not allow our fear about mental health to stop us from asking hard questions: How do we live with ourselves, especially when we feel we fall far short of the ideal person we would like to be?

What happens when we hit a moment of despair and feel there is no point in asking for help, because we are too broken to ever be fixed? What happens when we do reach out, but afterwards feel worse than we did before? How can we even talk about these things, seriously, without sounding weird or morbid?

We have all been told to look after our mental health, but as a teenager said to me lately, “How can I look after it if I don’t know what it is?”

When I read Kate’s story, what came to my mind was that mental health has everything to do with having a positive sense of who we are and feeling confident enough to be who we really are with others.

Problems can start to develop when a gap between who we really are and who we feel we should be gets too wide, and when we find ourselves working hard to cover up our flaws and win the approval and acceptance of others.

Trying to be something we are not can become addictive as the payoff from others when we achieve great things and get rewarded with their praise feels good.

The effort can be exhausting though and that exhaustion can lead to depression. At some point we may need to stop and give ourselves time to close the gap between our private self and our public self.

Personal revelations need a safe space and someone you can trust. Most of us need to talk about what we find hard to accept about who we are and the ways we may not be managing our lives. We may need time to reconcile different aspects of our lives before ever speaking about these things in any public way. Sudden exposure can be very unsettling and especially hard when the reactions you get are not quite what you hoped for.

The hope is that people will get appropriate help and support to prevent a crisis in their lives from turning into a suicidal crisis. This may mean a conversation with someone trustworthy in his or her life, or it may mean finding a therapist in whom they can confide.

Even with all the best support and advice in the world, though, some people will still, for any number of reasons, reach a moment in their lives when they may feel that suicide is their only way out. They feel their particular situation is beyond help, that there is no point trying.

Their despair may seem unreasonable to an outsider who sees the good in them and believes they have lots to live for, but the belief in that suicidal person’s mind is real and compelling.

If we are ever to reduce the rate of suicide we need not only to be able to talk about it, but to listen to someone and not be afraid to hear them say what they are feeling. Out of that space where truth can be spoken, where pain can be acknowledged, a wider perspective emerges, which we call hope.

As a country we all need to grow up. We need to recognise and to listen to the pain that is all around us.

We need to create opportunities for brave and honest conversations where people no longer feel they have to hide whatever it is that is troubling them. And that when they choose to talk, we will listen.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)