Well, we’re in Samhain now. The month marks the beginning of the dark half of the old Celtic year, and begins with All Soul’s Day, Lá Samhna. The Day of the Dead. Time to commemorate. Time to reflect on death itself.
The recent news that 106 people killed themselves in Ireland in the first three months of this year, however much the authorities caution us against interpreting the statistic negatively, is still sobering. Most were young men; the 21 women who killed themselves were, on average, more middle-aged.
Every day in Ireland, someone commits suicide.
Last year, 424 people killed themselves. Compare that with 276 - the number of people killed on Irish roads. More young Irish men die by their own hand than in traffic accidents. We are all familiar with the hand-wringing and the bitter rural-urban split over the issue of drink driving and alcohol limits, and yet the issue of suicide seems to leave us relatively speechless.
Which, in one way, is completely understandable.
We haven’t quite got our heads around it yet. Because, in order to do so, we have to examine our own deathwish, our own fascination with death. And that is too dangerous a topic to discuss honestly. As admirable as the new TV campaigns are, with actors earnestly talking about talking to each other, I am not sure that they provoke the necessary conversations afterwards.
Currently the most vivid manifestation of our unconscious yearning to talk about suicide is splashed on the front pages of the tabloids - but the headlines just scream, the fingers just point, the tongues just wag. There’s no thinking involved. It’s prurient judgmentalism at its most corrosive.
One reason why Stephen Gately’s death was treated with the odious disrespect that Jan Moir in the Daily Mail displayed, in her column on the day before his funeral, was that she makes a big deal out of role models, and believes that role models for young people should behave a certain way.
It’s a dubious concept at best - after all, the whole point of being a teenager is you get to choose your own role models, not those who are chosen for you by your parents. A Daily Mail journalist is most smugly true to type (i.e. “Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells”) when bitterly complaining about how role models for the “young people of today” are not squeaky clean and pure.
I, for one, much prefer “role models” who are human like the rest of us, and honest with it. Stephen Gately was a trailblazer, openly talking about feeling depressed and seeking help and going on anti-depressants. Whatever about having been forced to come out by the Sun, to be open about his depression was unnecessary. Unlike floridly manic characters in the pop world in and out of rehab, such as Robbie or Whitney or Amy, Stephen Gately had the choice to disclose. He exercised it, in the knowledge that it would help others in a similar situation. His was a generous spirit.
The reason why Moir was at the centre of such a toxic whirlwind was that there was an extraordinarily transparent desire in the media to prove that his death was self-inflicted; she made it explicit, gave voice to the collective, salacious drooling. It’s the same with any celebrity death. The fourth estate had been snuffling around the muck in Majorca desperately trying to come up with the paydirt that could prove suicide, either directly, through an overdose or alcohol poisoning, or indirectly, through neglect, addiction, or some sort of moral lapse or “lifestyle choice”.
This last was Moir’s angle, and such was the revulsion it provoked, it may, mercifully, be the last time it is employed in these islands. It is now simply unacceptable to suggest that being gay is a choice. Once we are freed from that insinuation of causality, of Puritan morality, of outmoded psychiatric pathologising, we can then begin to look honestly and compassionately at the lives of gay people. Rather than use the suicides of gay people to make a sleazy point, as Moir did, I’d much rather try and understand the misery behind the suicides of people like Matt Lucas’ ex-partner (and, indeed, Stephen Gateley’s first boyfriend) solely in order to prevent them happening again in succeeding generations.
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