A leading psychiatrist has cautioned against the removal of the stigma from suicide, on the ground that taking one's life could be unwittingly presented to vulnerable people as an option in some circumstances.
Dr Patricia Casey, Professor of Psychiatry at UCD, told pilgrims at the annual Knock Shrine Novena in Co Mayo yesterday that taboos and sanctions serve useful functions in controlling social behaviour.
"Those who speak of the removal of suicide should tread very warily indeed," Dr Casey said. The overall suicide trend was upward and last year more than 400 people, mostly men, died by their own hand, she explained.
Dr Casey said a consistent finding among those who took their own lives was the extent to which they see nothing but gloom and misery ahead of them. Nowhere was self-loathing more apparent than among those who die by suicide.
Dr Casey added that many younger people who took their own lives did not have any long-term psychiatric illness, but rather were reacting to some immediate life-crisis to which they saw no solution and which they believed rendered their life meaningless.
The decision to die stemmed from a belief that their life was only of relative value rather than of absolute value.
Dr Casey said there has been much discussion in recent years about the suicide issue and aspects of this were welcome: "On the down side, however, I wonder if by constantly talking about it we were desensitising ourselves and others to it and unwittingly contributing to its increase.
"I also wonder if by removing the cultural and religious sanctions against it we are unwittingly presenting it to vulnerable people as an option in some circumstances." Dr Casey said the view of life as being only of relative rather than of absolute worth was a new one to Irish society.
She said the rising suicide rate across Europe was paralleled by the growth of secular humanism, an ideology that judges the value of life not in absolute terms but in terms of individual life, individual freedom and what the law will allow.