I'm not surprised to see an increase in male suicide rates. Suicide is one of my specialist areas of interest in my work, and it's a complex - but still taboo - topic, influenced by many factors and not lending itself particularly well to study.
Part of that problem is that coroners are very reluctant, unless there is categorical evidence to demonstrate that someone has deliberately attempted suicide in full possession of their faculties, to ascribe suicide as a cause of death. I am not saying this is wrong, but I suspect there are a lot of cases where death by misadventure has been given as the cause even though the death was, if not completely deliberately due to suicide in the legal sense, was clearly a product of some level of emotional distress amounting to suicidality.
The other aspect that is often overlooked is about cause. It is probably true to say that only a small minority of suicides can be directly attributable to, for example, struggles with the benefits system, but there will be many, many more where, while one may not be able to put hand on heart and say "The DWP/government/ATOS killed this person", it wouldn't be unreasonable to acknowledge that the difficulties they were experiencing contributed to a level of emotional distress which, at the very least, increased the risk of their attempting suicide. Of course, in typical black/white political logic, I am sure that those responsible for the system that create such distress would immediately argue that, since it was not possible to point the finger directly at their activities as a cause, they can completely disown any responsibility for it.
On a larger scale, the correlation between rates of (in this case) male suicide and economic depression do paint a rather compelling picture, but of course we have to be careful not to automatically assume that correlation implies causation. Nonetheless, suicide is a leading cause of death of young men, and we would be remiss as a society if we failed to ask some very searching questions as to why so many of ours are killing themselves.
As part of my practice, I work as a counsellor in a doctors' surgery, and consistently between 80% and 100% of my caseload is people who are currently engaged in the ATOS/DWP/tribunal process. Many of them are very matter-of-fact about it, but hearing their stories can be difficult, when one considers how much of the day-to-day difficulty they are experiencing are avoidable, on top of whatever problems their disabilities, mental health issues, or life circumstances are causing them. I haven't lost anyone yet, but I fear that it is only a matter of time. Too frequently, I hear clients saying "I really don't know where to turn, and I often wonder if I (or my family) would not be better off if I was dead."
Those are stark words, and, in the unlikely event of my having to attend a coroner's inquest, they are words I would have to repeat. But even there, it would be perfectly possible for Mr Duncan Smith, or Cameron, or Osborne to say "ah, but you can't say that it was our policies that killed that person". They'd be right: I couldn't. But I know that, if one of those people were to kill themselves, it is likely that the brutal and unfair treatment that had been meted out to an already vulnerable person would be a very significant straw that had broken the camel's back.
And it is hard for me, as a therapist, to hear those words and to some extent not feel inclined to agree: if I were having to endure the catalogue of injustice that these people relate, and which has been endlessly repeated both here and on Facebook groups, benefits advocacy sites, etc., I would be seriously wondering if it were worth all the distress and aggravation. It makes me furious - that, as someone whose job it is to try and help people make sense of their lives, I am hobbled by the fact that others are actively doing everything in their power to make the lives of such people as meaningless, arbitrary, and miserable as possible.
I don't imagine any one individual within that system sets out to drive people to suicide, or would not be somewhat distressed to learn that one of their cases had killed themselves. But the system as a whole does operate that way, and the "groupthink" that inevitably arises as an artefact of such systems will, at some level, be saying "It's their choice, it's their responsibility, and if they want to kill themselves that's their business - one less case isn't going to make our job worse."
Until these organisations (and politicians) can recognise their own accountability for the degradation in the quality of people's lives which is manifesting as increasing rates of suicide, nothing will change, and people will continue to kill themselves. I have no idea what will change that.
End of rant.
