Stop evaluating your worth in monetary terms - it's your human qualities that count
SUICIDE IS a difficult subject to write about in the current economic crisis. The difficulty lies in the fear that writing about the topic may encourage some people to take their own lives.
The fact is, though, that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. Realising the potential dangers of brooding on thoughts of suicide, people under pressure can break that chain of thoughts instead of following it to a tragic conclusion.
That financial crisis is linked to suicide is well known. A stereotypical image of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 is of men jumping out of skyscraper windows to their deaths. I'll come back to that later because it didn't happen quite like that.
While we haven't had reports of suicides in Ireland in the present crisis, there have been reports from around the world of men prompted to take their own lives by the economic crash.
The Financial Timesrecently reported a rise in suicides among investors and stockbrokers in India. One suicide prevention helpline in Mumbai has begun an outreach programme aimed at workers in financial services. Last July a Calcutta newspaper, the Telegraph, reported that financial worries had become the second biggest cause of suicide. The New York Timesrecently published reports of suicides in the United States by people who had lost a lot of money due to the financial crisis.
That report also noted an important point about the Wall Street Crash in 1929. This is that the number of suicides that took place during the Crash was relatively low. The major increase came in the years after the Crash as the Great Depression got under way.
This suggests to me that in the height of the crisis many people draw strength from the feeling that we're all in this together. It's later, when the excitement has died down and people begin to feel alone, that the danger of suicide increases.
It seems to me that there are a number of factors at work in suicide linked to financial events.
First, there may be a sense of shame linked to financial failure. As people slip into depression they may place more blame on themselves than is warranted. It's as if they discount the role of the wider system in what has happened to them.
Perhaps they took all the credit when things were going well and now they take all the blame on their shoulders because things are going badly.
All this in turn may be linked to their own self-image. If you have based your image of yourself as a worthwhile human being on your ability to make money, then when you start losing money your self-image can collapse.
Then there is the fear of having let people down, particularly one's own family or one's customers as if you alone should have been able to shield them from reality.
Allied to this may be the conviction that without money you and your family can never be happy. As I have pointed out in previous articles, this has been proven time and again to be untrue.
If you can manage to meet basic needs for food, shelter, education and so on, extra money doesn't really make much difference - no matter how much you have, you get used to it and want more.
Where does all this leave us? First, there is a need for anyone contemplating suicide for financial reasons to understand that taking your own life is a far greater failure than losing your house.
The pain experienced by your family, both close family and extended family, if you kill yourself will be greater and will last longer than the distress resulting from business failure. And when it comes to letting people down - well, suicide is the ultimate let-down.
What you need to do is to accept the pain and work your way through it, perhaps by talking to someone you can trust or by going to a counsellor or, even, a good accountant.
And you need to stop seeing your worth as a human being in monetary terms and learn to see it in terms of your human qualities. That's the sort of worth that withstands crises.
• Padraig OMorain is a counsellor. His book, Thats Men, the best of the Thats Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas