Warning: this article deals frankly with the subject of suicide.
Some readers may find these themes distressing.
If you have come upon this
article because you (or someone you know) is considering suicide,
please click the header for the full article and go straight to the end for a crucial message I
would like to give you (or them). I will not attack you, nor
disservice you with the kinds of statements you have likely already
had inflicted on you.
Currently,
about 30,000
people commit suicide in Japan every year.
That is a harrowing enough statistic – double the number of deaths
from the March 2011 Triple Disaster, every year – but it
also confronts you directly in daily life here. I have yet
to find myself on a Japanese train that gets traumatically stopped
because somebody jumped in front of it, but a number of close friends
have, and such incidents recur nigh-daily on my Facebook feed or in
local news. I did, however, experience it in the UK, when a
London-to-Newcastle train I was on last autumn got taken out of
service because of it.
No
human society is alone in this. Suicide represents about
a million deaths a year across the world, spanning every country
on the planet. This is a global problem of hideous proportions.
When people talk
about somebody jumping in front of their train, it is typically with
the deepest sympathy for those affected. The
thousands of passengers inconvenienced; the driver who could not
brake in time, and will watch those gruesome images play out for the
rest of his or her days; the bystanders who caught sight of the
carnage; the police and rail staff who have to clean up the entrails
and blood; and any friends or family resultantly bereaved.
But I have noticed
that any reference to the person who jumped, in contrast, tends to
lack compassion. The suicidal person, one hears, is selfish. “Why
couldn't they have just done it somewhere else?” The sentiment is
of cold disdain for his or her apparent weakness, cowardice, lack of
concern for others. And it may be expressed with a certain passivity,
the language of shrugs and avoidance and “well, you know”s, as
though the act of suicide morally cheapens the deceased, makes them
somehow too distasteful to merit the privilege of entertainment on
the commentator's tongue.
Stuck on that train
so disrupted at Durham station on a late autumn evening, the
passengers around me saw fit to joke
about it. Together they openly mocked
that unseen, unknown, invisible someone who had departed from our
world in circumstances they had no concrete information on.
“Why
couldn't they have done it somewhere else?” This feeling was
bounced around with humour.
With the most unhesitating amused contempt.
Still
don't see my concern? Consider this account by Jay Griffiths in her
Orion article,
'Artifice v Pastoral', in 2009.
This morning on the
radio...I heard of an unhappy lad, only seventeen, who climbed up a
multi-story car park and for some three hours he delayed, agonizing
about his life and wondering whether to jump, a strange, sad Hamlet
of suicide. A crowd of some seven hundred people gathered, and people
in the crowd began jeering, cruelly goading him to jump. “Jump, you
****, jump,” it was reported...He jumped to his death. People in
the crowd shoved forward to take pictures of his dead and mangled
body, and the local chief constable reported that people in the crowd
posted pictures of the scene on the internet after the event.
Perhaps you begin to see what I am
getting at. But I want to make this real clear.
To those baying and bloodthirsty mobs; to those
observers or commentators who casually remark about the
patheticalness or selfishness or weakness of people who commit
suicide as though they have half a bloody clue what they are talking
about; to those who gallivant on their moral high horses and speak of
suicidal people as though something of the dust and filth beneath
them; and to those contemptible wretches on that train in Durham, who
were mildly irritated by the delay but found that person's death
funny: I say – enough.
That assault on suicidal people. That normative massacre. Enough. It
stops. It finishes, today.
This is an
article I have waited to write for years. I have only waited because
I did not want to do it until I could do it properly.
Because
you see, I've been there too.
Because I have known what it means to hanker for the freedom of my
own demise for years on end, and to make an attempt on it.
Because I have stood at the brink, reached across the frontier, and
shaken hands with death.
Because I knew then, as I already did, that we, the human species,
have created horrors in life infinitely
worse than anything
death could present us.
And
because, having turned my back on that frontier as circumstances
contrived, I am not going to waste that experience by not bringing it
down upon the sausage-machines
of living hell
our societies have created, which condemn millions, millions too many
to a fate as soul-rippingly miserable as any we make films about or
build monuments to or craft human rights treaties about – yet whose
victims we jeer from that company with unparalleled scorn.
So
I do not write on this lightly. The agony of
knowing only to seek your own death is
something no living being should have to experience. Not one. If you
know it, or have known it, you know it is something you could not
wish upon the vilest of your enemies. And a world in which this agony
exists is suspect enough, but a world in which it exists for
millions of people is
a disgrace of metaphysical magnitude.
I write this because I want this travesty to end. I write this
because I want no-one to ever have to go through it ever again. I
write this because we, humanity, keep doing this to people,
systematically, while denying our role in it. And because of my own
experience of this, you will excuse me if I occasionally come across
as just a bit furious in the following evisceration of all those
people who, in their ignorance, their sanctimoniousness, or their
desire to feel superior, have yet to recognise that their
self-satisfied supercilious attitudes to suicidal people are actually
quite a fucking contemptible thing.
That
compassionlessness, that callousness, is precisely what transforms
this into a world which drives people out of their lives in the first
place.
That is what I write this to assert.
Too long have we relegated suicide to taboo status, an inconvenience
best not discussed, so that when it happens it can swiftly be blamed
on the moral or cognitive poverty of the suicidal individual, as though all the rest of us are alright and
suicidal people are just unwelcome anomalies in an otherwise
functioning society.
Keep this up, and we will continue, day after day, to lose hundreds
of thousands of human beings – all their love, all their dreams,
all their diversity, all their contributions to making this a better
world – until we lower ourselves to consider that our
societies are causing suicide.
And
let's be completely clear what causing
means. It does not mean the “romanticisation” of suicide, as has
become a popular scapegoat. It does not mean things like “positive
cultural interpretations” of suicide, a charge so frequently hurled
at Japanese heritage, for example. Scapegoats - all scapegoats. Thirty
thousand shattered salarymen, alienated youths and miscellaneous
tortured souls do not jump in front of Japanese trains or hang
themselves in Aokigahara because
they believe it brings supreme honour upon them in the name of the
emperor or some such. That seventeen-year-old did not jump off the
car park because he had taken on romantic ideas about the transience
of life and eternal mystery of death or suchlike. And I did not walk
into the Thames on that January afternoon because of any of that
shit. I did it because other
people had tortured me to death, while
the social norms and structures established my suffering as 100% my fault,
inscrutably and comprehensively, while completely ignoring all those
others' malicious deeds, holding up those cruel norms and structures
as though they were absolute and commonsense laws of the universe,
and castigating me simultaneously for ethical failures and for mental
disorder for not accepting those judgements without question.
There
are few matters where I accept that you have to have directly
experienced something to properly comment on it. That's usually too
easy an excuse to silence criticism. But suicide is the singular
exception. If you are capable of attacking suicidal people, then you
simply do not know what it means when existence
itself becomes a twisted abomination of torment
devouring all time, space and reason.
(Worse still there are known to be people who simply do not care,
surely be the very originators of evil.)
So I am going to confront some popular myths here, myths as
preposterous as they are shameful for ever entering our suicide
discourse in the first place.
The myth that suicide is necessarily a choice;
The myth that suicide is necessarily selfish;
And the unspoken assumption that suicide is principally a problem
with suicidal individuals, which reflects no further on the
societies around them.
