THE FIGURES are indeed shocking, but it is only when victims or their families are known to us (even if just tangentially) that we really begin to engage with the heart-rending enormity of suicide, and its myriad implications and repercussions.
Towards the tail end of last year, a man I used to be quite friendly with drove with his wife to an isolated spot not far from their home. A gas cylinder was emptied within the car and a cigarette lighter ignited, and two daughters were left parentless.
Doubtless the determinedly judgmental wondered how any mother and father could inflict such a tragedy upon their children. The more thoughtful ruefully reflected upon the weight of real and imagined problems that had driven loving parents to such recourse, and what might have been done to ease their burden and avoid this horrible ending.
According to subsequent media reports, the couple were struggling financially because the husband had been unable to find work. Those few seemingly innocuous words, “the husband had been unable to find work”, explained much to anyone who knew the man.
He took inordinate pride in his work, and in the very act of earning a living and providing for his family. Acquaintances could easily imagine how long-term enforced idleness, never mind its financial implications, might have sent his (and her) world spiralling downwards.
The wife had been receiving psychiatric care shortly before she and her husband decided that their lives had become unbearable. Too late did people realise that all the signs had been there.
Other suicides seem to defy explanation, and suggest that intervention could only have been unintentional. One evening just over three years ago, a seemingly carefree 14-year-old girl, well known to my children, stopped with a relative of mine to inquire when the next bus to a nearby village was due. The following morning she was found in that village’s forest park, having taken taken her own life.
This was neither the first nor the last in a number of mostly inexplicable suicides of young people at various locations across a largely rural area close to where I live.
What are concerned parents living in a suicide hotspot to do, except continue to impress upon their children that there is no subject or seemingly intractable problem which cannot be discussed or resolved? And, of course, remain alert to any warning signs (knowing that there are often none).
What are we as a society to do about suicide generally? For the past decade, about 500 citizens of the Republic have been taking their own lives every year, and, relative to the size of population, the figures for Northern Ireland appear worse. Last year, 289 people took their own lives in the North, the vast majority of whom (216) were males. The suicide rate almost doubled in Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2010, from 8.6 to 16 per 100,000 of the population.
When one considers that virtually every victim had a family and a circle of friends and acquaintances, it raises the question of how many people there are left on this island who have not been touched in some way by suicide during the past 10 years.
I think one can safely presume, therefore, that public sympathy for the victims of suicide and their families is probably more widespread than it has ever been.
However, welcome though post-tragedy sympathy is, by definition it is reactive. What we urgently need is a proactive approach aimed at reducing the frequency of suicide.
This is where well-meaning pontificators such as me invariably fall down. For it is one thing to (lazily) declare that something must be done about suicide rates, but quite another to suggest in any detail what that “something” might be.
People who take their own lives come from every social, economic, gender and age group. The trigger factor (or, most often, long fuse) for suicide, when one can be identified, might vary markedly from one incident to another. And as John Waters recently pointed out in this newspaper, we cannot jump to easy assumptions.
Although the effects of recession have driven many people to end their lives, during the period that suicide rates were doubling in the Republic (between the early 1980s and the late 1990s) the sharpest rise occurred in times of economic expansion.
Likewise, it seems counterintuitive that suicide rates doubled in Northern Ireland in the decade following the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
This is not to suggest that nothing can be done to reduce the incidence of suicide, but almost the opposite: that many different, albeit complementary and sometimes overlapping, anti-suicide strategies are needed. Implemented in tandem with one another, these must be targeted at the groups and sub-groups within society that have already been identified as being most at risk from suicide (the most obvious among these are males and young people).
Crucially, the battle against suicide must be properly funded, constant, aggressive and all-pervasive. It is self-evident that the traditional one-size-fits-all, short-lived campaign, delivered almost entirely via the media, does not work. It is not “something” we need to do, but many things.