Madam, - Your Editorial of September 1st was a response to the tenfold increase in suicides in the Republic since the early 1960s. You suggested that the cause of suicide is a mental illness called "hopelessness". But the question of why, in this period, suicides have increased tenfold was left unanswered.
The answer is that here, as elsewhere in the West, there has been a steep increase in the perception of life as senseless. An individual judges that the life presented to him makes sense when its framework of values and rules to live by - the set of dos, don'ts and do-as-you likes upheld by the powers that be - makes sense.
Up to the 1960s, that framework made sense to Irish people, more or less. Essentially, it was the well-tried framework of Western civilisation. From the 1960s, there has been a progressive rejection and replacement of those Western rules.
The new collection of rules, thrown together pell-mell and containing many contradictions, does not make sense. As such, it offends the deep human need for a life-framework that does this. So consciousness of this presented, senseless life offends, and a sane desire arises to annihilate consciousness of it.
Sensitive young people are particularly attentive to the framework of rules presented to them. Little wonder, then, that many of them, over the past half-century, have practised various methods of annihilating consciousness temporarily - through drugs or drunkenness or reckless sex, through motorised speed or disco dancing or mass raves or rock concerts, or by means of personal stereos plugging ears and removing minds. And increasing numbers of them have opted for annihilating consciousness permanently.
In short, the principal reason why, among the young and the mature, there has been a huge increase in suicide is not an increase in mental illness. More and more Irish people, having perceived the presented life as unbearably senseless, have reacted by annihilating their consciousness of it permanently.
In the current issue of the magazine Ireland's Eye, I have dealt with this matter more amply. - Yours, etc,
Dr DESMOND FENNELL, Maynooth, Co Kildare.
Madam, - President McAleese is to be commended for having the courage to suggest a link between the "bias and hostility" that gay men and women encounter and the choice that some make to commit suicide (The Irish Times, September 1st).
In the same edition Breda O'Brien writes on Archbishop Brady's remarks at Knock, in which he also addressed the problem of suicide - in young people in particular - and suggested that his organisation has something to offer young people so inclined.
However, he omitted to acknowledge his church's long history of purveying bias in the matter of sexual orientation. Both the present Pope and the last have been giants in promoting such bias. Archbishop Brady, whom Breda O'Brien calls "gentle, self-effacing and saintly", makes no connection between this bias in society and his church's teaching. This, I suppose, should not surprise us, since his organisation never accepts responsibility for any damage it does to people until forced to.
Ms O'Brien suggests that the Catholic Church has to find better ways to communicate its message. But if its message contains doctrines that may be linked to suicide, do we really want the archbishop to communicate this message more effectively? - Yours, etc,
DECLAN KELLY, Davis Court, Dublin 8.