Madam, – I have just read twice the first in your series of suicide stories (Carl O’Brien, Weekend Review, November 13th).
Phyllis MacNamara opens her heart and pages of her diary in a most honest fashion as she recounts the death of her dear husband.
The profound sense of loss for those left behind makes this type of bereavement particularly difficult. I would like to express my sympathy and gratitude to Ms MacNamara – I know that her courage will bring her through.
Almost 10 years have passed since I lost my own mother to the scourge of suicide, so may I also express my thanks to you for highlighting this “unspoken social phenomenon”. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – So strong was the call to duty message in your recent television adverts encouraging us to read “Stories of Suicide” that I approached the first in the series (Weekend Review, November 13th) with a leaden feeling of civic responsibility. But the account of Phyllis MacNamara’s loss of her husband to suicide was a magnificently human story of love, of loss and of living on.
Her diary entry a month after his passing, “He left me with an empty brown V-neck jumper to love” will stay with me for the powerfully sparse evocation of the helplessness of those left behind. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Your sober presentation and calm discussion of suicide are to be welcomed (Stories of suicide Weekend Review, November 13th). The role of the media, particularly newspapers, in reporting suicides should not be underestimated.
Sensationalised and repetitive accounts of individual cases, especially violent deaths, are known to trigger copycat suicides – the so-called Werther effect.
Happily, however, the opposite can also occur. Sensitive reporting of people coping with a crisis by adopting constructive, not self-destructive, strategies is linked to lower suicide rates.
This preventive outcome has recently been described in the British Journal of Psychiatryas the "Papageno effect" to honour the eponymous character who was persuaded not to take his own life in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which, coincidentally, was composed at the address below. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Your comment (Weekend Review, November 13th) points up the huge increase in the rate of suicide in recent times, an increase of almost 25 per cent in a year, echoing Minister for Health Mary Harney’s comments (Home News, November 19th) that there is “a strong link between our economic circumstances and suicide”. This is a most welcome observation as it suggests a new approach to help reduce the numbers of suicides.
My scientific and business training has always dictated that solutions can only be found for causes, not symptoms. I have no personal angle or academic agenda on this problem – I look at the evidence and I see we are not focusing on the root cause of the problem.
Suicide has always been seen in this country as a mental health issue and health workers were expected to identify and deal with potential suicides. That approach has failed – arguably because it was not tackling the root causes in many cases. While there are cases of clinical depression which perhaps can be treated, there are also suicides which are caused by economic factors and for which depression is only a symptom. A paper published by two Princeton college economists, Hamermesh and Soss in the 1970s reviewed suicide statistics worldwide and concluded there was a clear relationship between economic circumstances and suicide rates for certain groups characterised by age and gender. Ireland was singled out as the only country whose statistics on suicide were unreliable, owing to the reluctance of coroners to report suicide as cause of death. Thank goodness we have got over that inhibition and can deal with the problem now.
In Maharashtra in India, 25,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997. According to the Federation of Andhra Pradesh Farmers Associations, the number of suicides always rises from April to June because it is the time of the year when farmers find out whether their crop has failed and when money-lenders come to collect their payments. Depression and alcoholism are involved – people are depressed and may seek refuge in drink when they are bankrupt – but the root cause is still economic. Paradoxically, when government aid was given to bereaved families, the suicide rate went up, as the farmers now had a way to provide for their families through their own deaths.
You state that there are always unanswered, or unanswerable, questions about suicide:“Could the death have been avoided? Were there sufficient warning signs that a person was going to take his or her own life? What could possibly drive a person to feel life is so unbearable that they would want to leave it?”
If we recognise that a distressed economic situation is the cause of some or many suicides, then we can act on that cause. A bankrupt person facing personal ruin and the accompanying shame might well be tempted to end their life as a means of escaping from their burden and could act rationally, hiding the plan from family and friends until the last moment, as so many personal stories tragically recount. Not only do we need a “psychological autopsy” as your comments suggest – perhaps some financial autopsy is also needed.
Minister for Health Mary Harney has promised to seek closer co-operation between support groups. As a first step, I suggest this co-operation includes the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Mabs) which is expert in dealing with personal financial difficulties and whose remit should be widened to identifying persons in desperate circumstances and at risk of suicide, and referring them to more appropriate assistance, advice, counselling, etc. – Yours, etc,