Walking recently along those Galway streets that seem to buzz every night of the week, I felt completely out of place.
If you are not drinking, as I am not at the moment, you can walk along High Street at night and feel like you are the only person in Galway who is not sitting at a table outside a restaurant laughing, drinking a pint and enjoying life as it is meant to be enjoyed. That I rarely see anybody falling around drunk on the street only adds to the sense that I must be a bit of a freak if I’m not doing what everybody else is doing.
I walked along High Street and then onto Quay Street and across the bridge over the Corrib and onto a network of streets that is quiet only by comparison with those I had left. It must be a great thing to be a student in Galway, I thought, and to have these streets as your playground.
Next morning I mentioned all this to my taxi driver who told me about the young men who throw themselves into the Corrib River not far from where I was walking. Later that day a person on a course I was doing talked about the suicide problem in Galway, especially among young men.
How is it possible to move from the Shangri-La represented by the streets I mentioned at the start, to taking your own life only a matter of minutes away?
Prof Mark Williams, who recently retired from Oxford University, wrote in his 1997 book Cry of Pain that the sense of being trapped is especially dangerous for human beings and is strongly related to suicide.
No escape
In the wild, the animal that loses out in a conflict very often goes off to join another herd. So there’s an escape, and an alternative. In humans, because of how we have constructed society, it’s all too easy to think that there is no escape. I mentioned students above.
Look at the extraordinary pressures we put young people under now, starting with the years leading up to the Leaving Cert and ending only after university but maybe, after all that, working in a crappy job.
It must be awfully easy to feel trapped and to imagine that there is no escape. Indeed, Mark Williams talks about “contemporary society with its fear-based school system that prioritises examination grades as the central criterion of success, then wonders why many children and young people disengage”.
The fear in the system is a fear of the loss of status, not being able to hold your head up with other people, of failing to meet expectations. And it’s all too easy to get trapped in that fear.
Isolation
And it also too easy to get isolated. Remember how I described at the start of the article how I felt like a bit of a freak walking down apparently happy streets, just because I wasn’t drinking? See how easy it is to suddenly feel isolated even if you’re old enough to know that the feeling is illogical? Feelings and logic often run on separate tracks.
Neither I nor Mark Williams would suggest that what he called entrapment is the only explanation for suicide, which is a most complex issue. However, I believe it is a factor in many cases.
In the end, this article isn’t about Galway at all. It’s about the society that we have constructed and the extraordinary demands that young people are under.
As a society we need very much to start thinking differently about what we mean by success. I think we need to be able to recognise that a demand that one person embody academic achievement, social achievement, sexual achievement, and God knows what other kinds of achievement, is a dangerous fantasy.
How do we change this? We can make a start by understanding this: that it is illogical and wrong to demand more and more and more and more from human beings who have not changed, essentially, in millennia.
pomorain@yahoo.com
Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.