Suicide is Painless

It was Mental Health Week in the past days. As is often the case around this time I see more than a few people expressing, quite genuinely, the various limits on their own minds, whether it is depression, bipolar disorders, PSDT, or a range of other ailments that can lead a person to engage in behaviours that range from the seriously abnormal to the positively dangerous. To be certain, I am by no means immune to this; "strange fits of passion I have known" (or, to use a Spoonerism that I quipped at the Toorak Primary polling booth in 1996 to one voter "Strange pits of fashion I have known"). There have been times where I have been clinging on to sanity by my fingertips. Whilst I can recall at least three separate occasions when I seriously thought I was going over the edge (ahh, failures in affairs of the heart will do that), most of the time I give at least in the outward appearance of stability, at one point even being described as a 'spirit level' for an apparent ability to be able to contextualise and not be caught in the heightened emotions of the moment. On a deeper level though, I must admit the classic pathologies of modern life - anomie, alienation, and disenchantment - gnaw at my soul.

I mention this in the context of two unusual events on this day. The first was the appearance of one good friend at the Victorian Parliament's Inquiry on end-of-life choices. Readers will recall that I made two submissions to the Inquiry for different organisations; with little urging my friend made one in a personal capacity as someone who has a terminal illness and, in all probability, will eventually be subject to increasing paralysis, loss of cognition, and pain. His is a rational desire to avoid such a situation, to be able to empower a physician to assist him in voluntary euthanasia. In the second context, it involves one my oldest friends who is currently in a city hospital psychiatric ward, after taking a few too many depressants and a hefty dose of alcohol. I spent two hours with him today with other friends and the conversation was spirited and enjoyable; even if the surrounds were not unlike a prison and some of the other in-patients seemed overly aggressive towards the world and even to each other.

There is a tendency to see mental issues as individual issues, and mental conditions are often interpreted in a physicalist manner (e.g., behavioural or mood issues are due to brain chemistry abnormalities). Whilst this does contribute, a greater contributing factor is the social conditions ever since Durkheim's classic study of suicide which, even with its methodological problems, brought to home that even this apparently most individual act had deep and serious social influences. Indeed a whole host of other pathologies (e.g., murder) are so variant in different societies that differences can only really be attibuted to variation in social and environmental factors rather than individual psychosis. Which brings to the question whether individual treatments will ever be sufficient for what really a two-fold social problem; (i) a society which does not provide individual's the liberties to make their own self-regarding acts, including destructive acts and (ii) a society which subjects individuals with psychic assaults which generate destructive pathologies.