Sir, - It is my pastoral experience of many years that the "males" of John Waters's column (January 13th) who choose suicide for a variety of complex reasons are usually the brothers, boyfriends, husbands, partners, sons and fathers of women who are often the unacknowledged and real "victims" of male suicide in our patriarchial society.
It is women, often unsupported, who, more than anyone else, are left to carry the burden of shame, guilt and stigma in the wake of male suicides.
Sally Cline in her book Lifting The Taboo: Women, Death and Dying (1995) confirms this when she writes "that suicide is an act largely carried out by men and boys which has profound, often catastrophic, effects on women and girls." This is especially so when young males contribute greatly to the increase in suicide figures and the survivors are often mothers. Cline says of this particular group of women: "That maternal survivors, as a special group with needs of their own, have so far been insufficiently investigated, results partly from the fact that all survivors' needs have been overlooked; partly from a lack of acknowledgment that women's responses to suicide differ from men's."
For John Waters to conclude an article about the very serious and tragic problem of suicide implying that women, i.e. feminists, are "collaborators" in some unspecified way in their sons', husbands', brothers' and boyfriends' suicides makes the need for the scientific research work of the National Task Force On Suicide all the greater so that a co-ordinated response involving many concerned and affected groups, especially women bereaved by suicide, can be based on facts and not fiction. Otherwise male myths about suicide will continue to be disseminated. If Waters's conclusion can be proved to be true then we are witnessing today a form of female self-flagellation unprecedented even in medieval times and demanding a study of its own.
Following the American depression of 1893, when suicide was frequent but attracting little public attention or concern, the editors of the paper The San Diego Union, fearing a suicide epidemic, wrote in an editorial: "The horror which such acts should produce is giving way to indifference, or a morbid condition of the public mind which accepts self-murder as excusable and the natural outgrowth of modern conditions of life." They were, of course, concerned only about the increase in male suicides.
Waters's research would be more commendable if it was undertaken to lessen suicide's impact on women - and not for the purpose, it seems, of dangling his "males" publicly for pity on the unsupportive "natural outgrowth" of modern feminism. Other areas may explain the growth in male suicides. In his book Suicide And The Irish (1996), Dr Michael J. Kelleher says: "To date, in Ireland, there has been no study of suicide among the gay community." I take it that there has been no study because no funding for such a project has been provided by the Government. - Yours, etc.,
From Rev Peter O'Callaghan
Inch, Killeagh, Co Cork.