[suicide] to be or not to be

14 year old Mike Altman wrote this for M.A.S.H.:

The game of life is hard to play; I'm gonna lose it anyway;

The losing card I'll someday lay, so this is all I have to say:

That suicide is painless; it brings on many changes and I can take or leave it if I please.

… and Joy Division:

So this is permanence, love's shattered pride.

What once was innocence, turned on its side.

A cloud hangs over me, marks every move,

Deep in the memory, of what once was love.

Oh how I realised how I wanted time,

Put into perspective, tried so hard to find,

Just for one moment, thought I'd found my way.

Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.

In his second year of university, an old school friend, Rhys, who'd introduced me to Rugby Union at school, was sharing a bedsit with his best friend and one day he came home, left a note for is friend Will, then blew his brains out.

The note said how sorry he was for having caused so much trouble. What trouble? There'd never been any trouble.

Because of the fear and shame it generates, suicide is scary and difficult to talk about, even for health professionals, and usually it is reported in code: "there were no suspicious circumstances". Suicide is a major public health problem, accounting for 2101 deaths in Australia during 2005. There are 40 deaths a week and rates for young males are particularly high. Suicide is on a par with the road toll as a preventable cause of premature death. We are struggling to make a real impact.

Some suggest that the internet is leading to more suicides and you can see why in the case of some of those sites, the fora, the late nights and the seeming obsession [I'm in here now, for example].

On the other hand, there are suggestions that the net can, in fact, help decrease the number if it acts as a helpline. An example of such a site is http://www.reachout.com.au and the advantage is that the helpline is just a click away for a young internetter.

Mary Quant said, in the Observer, in 1996:

Being young is greatly overestimated . . . any failure seems so total. Later on you realize you can have another go.

Many won't make it that far.

And what of yours truly? Many times it's crossed my mind but four things stop it.

1 It's self-indulgent and concerned with one's introspective ego, a failing of the young but also prevalent amongst the not so young of a certain mental set. A passage by Agatha Christie said it, for me:

You take your life today and perhaps in five, six, seven years hence, someone else will go to death of disaster simply for the lack of your presence in a given spot or place.

You say your life is your own.

But can you dare to ignore the chance that we are taking part in some gigantic drama under the orders of a Divine producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play - a mere walking on part - but upon it may hang the issues of the play.

2 Douglas Adams' "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" is close to the Australian Aborigines' idea of the same kind - that the earth and the sky feel every nuance, every scream of terror and every murder, even self-murder.

3 The technicality that if one is Christian, then suicide is a backsliding against the 3rd person, a statement, in fact, that the 3rd person can't help you and therefore a one way ticket to the infernal regions.

4 I always want to know what's happening tomorrow.

Taken together, this is a nicety which keeps me alive. What keeps you alive?