Richard Moore's Straight Talk Columns

Sensitive approach to suicide needed

2/8/2011

WILL someone please pinch me, poke me with a needle, or just slap me. I feel I'm caught in a time warp and have travelled back in time to dark days that one had hoped were long gone.

Am I in the ancient world? The Dark Ages? The times of Inquisition? Or even the blinkered unthinking 1950s?

They are all possibilities bearing in mind some unbelievable rubbish spoken by an MP.

Maori Party rep Te Ururoa Flavell recently said that a very hard stand needed to be taken against people who commit suicide.

In a newspaper column he said ``If a child commits suicide, let us consider not celebrating their lives on our marae; perhaps bury them at the entrance of the cemetery so their deaths will be condemned by the people.''

What? Is he kidding?

Perhaps we can also chop their heads off before burying them in unmarked graves? Or how about carrying their bodies naked through the streets to humiliate them after death? Bury them in a field with a stake through their body? Or confiscate all their family's assets?

All of those things have been tried before - by the church, the ancient Greeks, Elizabethan England and Louis XIV's France - and they haven't stopped depressed or mentally ill people taking their own lives.

It is true that the youth suicide rate in New Zealand is the worst in the world with 26.7 people per 100,000 killing themselves. The previous worst, Finland, has dropped to second with 22.8 per 100,000.

Australia, at No 6, had a little bit less than half New Zealand's rate at 14.6 per 100,000.

Flavell's comments have upset many parents who have lost loved ones to suicide.

I can't blame them, to me there would be nothing worse than outliving any of your children. The pain of losing a child to a car accident, sickness, or violence would be terrible, but to lose one because they didn't want to live any more would be soul-killing.

Two of the saddest stories I know have involved people killing themselves.

A former colleague went home one day to discover his teenage son had killed himself. He and his family were distraught, the victim's sibling in particular. My colleague went home several weeks after his son's death and discovered his other boy - devastated by his brother's death - had also killed himself.

There are few words for that parental horror.

Then there was the case of a young man who couldn't find a job. He'd always wanted to be on the railways and had applied several times.

After a time he'd had no response and became increasingly despondent. One day he too took his own life.

The tragedy was there was a letter in the mailbox accepting him into the railways.

Imagine his family's grief.

In 2003 I got a phone call from my best mate's lady. He was missing and she wanted to know if I'd seen him.

I said ``no'' and that sparked a big hunt by all his friends and family to track him down.

Three days later his body was found in the Yarra River, several kilometres from where I lived.

His lady didn't know he had been depressed. His colleagues didn't either. Nor, it saddens me to say, did I.

There was nothing in his behaviour that suggested he was intent on ending a professionally successful life.

He was loved, well respected and yet Flavell's suggested tough stance on suicides would have meant his family and friends could not have mourned my mate properly.

Initially, Flavell refused to back away from his comments but public outrage seems to have softened his attitude. He said his column was written after the tangi of a young man. He was moved by the pain he saw the family suffering.

``I wrote the column to bring attention to this issue and provoke discussion and debate,'' he said. ``I do, however, understand this is not the only way to address this issue.''

Too right matey.

I can understand a columnist provoking discussion through starting a debate, but one has to be very careful about how one treats certain subjects.

Suicide in this country is a terrible problem and it is not one to be solved through sensationalising the issue. Dealing with unemployment, drugs and alcohol, abuse and poverty would be a start, while improving funding for mental health issues is essential.

Rather than Flavell's unkind approach to the families of the unfortunates who kill themselves, I'd prefer the one taken by ex-All Black John Kirwan. Kirwan has publicised his own torment with depression and is the face of a more sensible and sensitive way to help save people's lives.

richard@richardmoore.com