Killing time

The death of boxer Darren Sutherland allowed the media to go to town on three Irish obsessions: celebrity, sport and suicide.

On 14 September 2009, Sutherland, an Olympic boxing champion turned professional, was found dead at his London apartment by promoter Frank Maloney. He is thought to have hanged himself. The media immediately went into overdrive, reporting the incident and its fallout for days on end, including running an ill-advised interview with Sutherland’s family who would have been better served by being left to grieve and not expected to offer insight into something that will naturally have shocked and dismayed them.

Sutherland’s death, telescoped as a result of his fame, is only one case of high-profile coverage of suicide in Ireland. Last month, for example, the Irish Examiner, a respected broadsheet newspaper, published a supplement dedicated entirely to suicide, featuring stark, tombstone-like design and a bewildering litany of facts and figure as well as opinions on why people kill themselves. (1)

Predictably, some commentators have linked the obsession with suicide to Ireland’s Catholicism. This is not entirely without justification. The Catholic Church does consider suicide a ‘grave sin’ and, until the liberalisation of the Church under the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, anyone who took their own life was routinely denied burial rites and had to be buried in ‘unconsecrated’ ground (and often at night). In recent decades, however, the Church has modernised its teachings and now treats suicides like any other death. The 1997 catechism went even further, suggesting that suicide was a result of mental illness and therefore results in diminished responsibility for the ‘sin’.

However, when all is said and done, banging the ‘blame the Church’ drum is a rather tired and lazy excuse for analysis in an Ireland that is almost completely secularised and has seen the Church lose almost all of its authority due to scandal after scandal and a general rise in living standards and expectations. For a start, even the media in the North, where Catholicism is less prevalent and even practising Catholics have been more secularised historically, is obsessing over the issue. Just this week, the Northern edition of the tabloid Sunday World was being investigated by the British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) after publishing a photograph of a man who hanged himself on a bridge in Bangor, County Down. (2) In addition, suicide is an equally prevalent issue in Britain, with the media regularly blamed for ‘promoting’ it. (3)

Rather than being a reflection of latent Catholicism, the obsession with suicide is linked to more contemporary concepts of ‘sin’ – such as supposed ‘social evils’ like alcohol.

The Irish Association of Suicidology (IAS) says that the public no-longer view suicide as a ‘mortal sin’, so much as a result of mental health problems:

“The majority of people north and south believe that suicide is a symptom of mental illness. However, in the south 38 per cent disagree with this. Suicide has been over medicalised in the past and while doctors have an important part to play in dealing with suicide, suicide is a societal problem with multifaceted determinants.” (4)

Indeed, suicide, self-harm and just about every facet of modern life, positive and negative alike, from over-eating to so-called ‘binge flying’, have been over-medicalised to the point where it often seems all of human activity is being pathologised.

And yet, amid the doctoring of the public and press reportage of gory ends, few resources appear to be being dedicated to making a positive case for living – other than through a negative therapeutic paradigm.

Both the IAS and the Irish government’s Office for Suicide Prevention produce ‘guidelines’ for the media on the reporting of suicide and display a concern with language – don’t write ‘committed suicide’ or ‘killed himself, do write ‘took his own life’ – that borders on the obsessive. It could easily be argued that this itself helps reinforce the mystique around the act by scorning everyday language and promoting the use of supposedly ‘less judgemental’ euphemisms.

(On the issue of terminology, ‘suicide’, in fact, does not exist. The word is so commonly used in Ireland that it is unavoidable when discussing the subject, but suicide refers to a specific crime that no longer exists – the crime of depriving the state of one of its subjects.)

Media outlets are discouraged from reporting on specific methods of suicide, for fear that vulnerable individuals will mimic them.

“Copycat suicide is a real phenomenon,” said psychiatrist Dr John Connolly, secretary of the IAS, speaking to forth on the telephone. “It accounts, depending on which study you read, for between one and six per cent of suicides among the general population and between two and fifteen per cent in adolescents.

“The effect of the media may be quite small but it’s easy to do something about with good will,” he said.

Doubtlessly Connolly is correct and revealing every detail of every story is not the principal job of a reporter – nailing a story is – though it is questionable that people would be unaware of potential suicide methods without reading about them in newspapers. However, the IAS is on more slippery ground when it talks about other factors in suicide. The IAS report claims alcohol is a major factor in people killing themselves, reporting that: “Seven in ten people regard alcohol as a major contributor to suicide, which it is, but can this understanding be translated into action to change our drinking culture?” (5)

Inferring causation between Ireland’s ‘drinking culture’ and incidences of suicide is an intellectual leap in the dark. The connection between alcohol and suicide could just as easily be that those who have already decided to kill themselves feel the act will be made easier or less painful by consuming alcohol or that deeply unhappy people are more likely to consume large quantities of alcohol or other drugs in order to escape their emotions.

A statistical report issued by the (now defunct) Departments of Public Health (DPH) in 2001 (produced with amazingly over-done and morbid graphic design – poor taste at the very least) contradicts the IAS claim that “suicide is a societal problem” as opposed to a medical one, noting that, “mental health disorders, especially depression, remain the highest risk factor for suicide”. (6) Of course, today the category of depression is now so wide that this statement is verging on meaningless.

In reality, both views are rooted in fact: suicide is both a medical and a social issue.

The 2001 DPH report mirrors that of the acclaimed epidemiological report, the Whitehall Studies in Britain, linking a lack of control over one’s life to experience of ill health. (7) The Whitehall Studies found “a steep inverse association between social class, as assessed by grade of employment, and mortality from a wide range of diseases” and argued that pay and lack of job responsibility were significant factors in ill-health. (8) Similarly, the DPH report states: “Almost a third of men [who killed themselves] were unemployed, and two-thirds of these had been unemployed for more than one year.” (9)

The DPH did state: “Alcohol-related problems were significant risk factors for suicide,” and “alcohol abuse compounds many of the risk factors for suicide,” but it stopped short of directly blaming alcohol consumption for deaths. (10)

Media coverage of suicide is occasionally prurient, but more often it blindly follows officialdom’s line that suicide is often a result of whatever phantom ‘social evil’ is the cause du jour – alcohol, recreational drug use and so on – and must be countered by ever more pointless campaigns to ‘raise awareness’ of the issue.

Rather than concerning us with tragic, but ultimately pointless, deaths or obsessing with providing youths with access to counsellors, why not try to develop a society that values the lives of its citizens? A good starting point would be demarcating a clearer distinction between the state of unhappiness, a social and cultural issue, and clinical depression. In addition, rather than pathologising everyday life as an endless series of problems, why not focus on the fact that people are in fact capable of great things?

Ireland’s political elite appears to be obsessed with self-killing – barely a month goes by without an elected representative talking-up the tragedy of suicide. Even the office of the President has weighed-in on the issue. (11) (Of course, the position of Irish president is steeped in victimology so that is less surprising than it might otherwise be.) But all of this hand-wringing and the inevitable and endless stream of reports fail to do one key thing: prove to people that life is worth living.

The Áras an Uachtaráin report, for example, suggested establishing “a leadership structure linked to government to co-ordinate, resource and administer the work of suicide prevention” and “a major media campaign to promote positive mental and emotional health and challenge the stigma surrounding mental distress”. A more worthy use of resources might be tackling the social and economic issues at the heart of many people’s despair.

Of course, officialdom is one thing, but the fact that people in the street continue to respond to suicide, particularly the suicide of young people, with shock and sadness can only be a good thing if we really want to live in a society that values life.

Ultimately, the media is following the morbid obsession with suicide, not leading it. The Sunday World’s Northern editor, Jim McDowell, said his newspaper’s decision to publish the photograph was in the public interest: “That is what newspapers do,” he told the BBC. (12) No doubt this is a self-serving point-of-view – but it also happens to be the truth. The last thing we need is a moral panic about suicide.

forth contacted the Office of Suicide Prevention but did not receive a response in time for publication

(1) Suicide: A special investigation, supplement to the Irish Examiner, October 13, 2009

(2) Editor defends ‘suicide’ picture, BBC News, November 2, 2009

(3) See: Influences of the media on suicide, British Medical Journal, December 14, 2002

(4) IAS survey reveals changing attitudes to suicide in Ireland, Irish Association of Suicidology Newsletter, Vol. 3, issue 4, Winter 2006

(5) Ibid

(6) Suicide in Ireland A National Study [PDF], Departments of Public Health, 2001

(7) See Whitehall II, University College London, 2008

(8) Ibid

Op Cit. Departments of Public Health

(10) Ibid

(11) Suicide In Ireland – Everybody’s Problem: A summary of the Forum for Integration and Partnership of Stakeholders in Suicide Prevention [PDF], held at Áras an Uachtaráin, March 2nd, 2005 [PDF], Áras an Uachtaráin web site, 2005

(12) Op Cit. BBC News