Suicide

As MPs prepare to consider a private member's bill to license what is being euphemistically called 'assisted dying', in Belgium a young woman with mental health problems has been cleared for euthanasia some time this summer. The Belgium-based outlet DeMorgen outlined the situation of the 24-year-old, identified only as ‘Laura’. Aside from depression and the feeling that 'she wanted to die ever since childhood', ‘Laura’ is physically healthy, enjoys coffee, friends and going to the theatre. According to the New Yorker, 13 percent of Belgians who died by euthanasia last year didn’t have a terminal illness — and 3 percent suffered from mental disorders. Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002.  Since then the numbers have soared.

A pal recently told me a story. It was about a friend of theirs who had been travelling on a train last summer, one of those old fashioned trains, with the windows that let you open the door from the outside. He was leaning on the door with his arm resting outside when another train suddenly passed by and clipped his hand. His wrist snapped. There was blood everywhere. He turned back into the carriage and was relieved to see his fellow travellers reaching for their phones. He assumed they were dialling for help. But he quickly realised he was wrong. They were in fact taking photos. I was reminded of this somewhat grim story today, after I read about a man from Telford who had committed suicide on Saturday.

There was much discussion recently about the rise in male suicide rates, after official figures published last week showed they were at their highest level since 2001. But one aspect of this has attracted little attention: the lack of support for men abused by their partners. In a poll of 130 Citizens Advice Bureaux workers, 63 per cent said it was easy to get help for women reporting domestic abuse, compared to 13 per cent for men. It’s bad enough that men struggle to find help once they pluck up the courage to ask for it. But they are also less likely than women to look for support in the first place - and more likely to be disbelieved.

There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking as to be denied by Baptist historians for two and a half centuries,’ Stephen Wright, the expert on separatist clergy wrote, ‘he rebaptised first himself and then his followers, and set out his new views in The Character of the Beast (1610).’ His former confederate Richard Bernard fired a counterblast in that year showing (to his own satisfaction) that ‘the Church of England is Apostolicall, the Separation Schismaticall’. Reading a word like sebaptist we take the prefix se- to indicate a reflexive act, a self-baptism, as we would if reading French or Spanish. But that is not how ancient Romans used se-.

According to an email I received earlier this afternoon, I should be worried about the mental state of someone I know. An alert popped up in my inbox from an app called 'Radar' which the Samaritans launched this week, telling me a tweet from someone I followed might suggest they were contemplating suicide. Here's the tweet: Clearly the Samaritans need to work on their formula, otherwise I'll be receiving daily alerts whenever Jim Murphy warns against Scottish Labour committing electoral self-harm or one Conservative faction warns another faction that it is being politically suicidal.

Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss performances of his musical play staged earlier this month. Shot at Dawn is about a sister’s quest for a recognition (after his death) of her brother, Harry Briggs, a soldier in the Great War who was executed for desertion. The play is sympathetic to the idea of posthumous pardon; coupled with this, it’s a lament that society punishes people without trying to understand why they do what they did. A second theme emerges: homosexuality, and the difficulty (then) of living with this in a world that does not understand. I suppose you could say that Ross’s play is about looking back not in anger but in sympathy. Here’s a heresy, then.

There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the major differences between e.g. Christians and pagans was that Christians were renowned for welcoming, indeed rejoicing at, death. Pagans found this incomprehensible. Not that pagans feared the afterlife. Although, in the absence of sacred texts, there were no received views on the matter, Greeks reckoned that if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate it in this life rather than the next.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Harris and Madeleine Teahan discuss the Assisted Dying Bill" startat=874] Listen [/audioplayer]If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/ It brings on many changes/ And I can take or leave it if I please’. However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it.

The graph below shows one of the most unsettling trends I've come across. It's the female and male suicide rates, and while the former has halved since the 1980s, the latter has fallen by just 8 per cent. Men account for 77 per cent of all suicides, and the group now most likely to take their lives are men aged 40-44. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/flzpM/index.html"] These are the starkest statistics in what I argue in this week's magazine is a 'crisis of masculinity' in our country. There are male-specific problems ranging from catastrophic mental health conditions to boys falling behind girls at every stage of their education. Men get ahead in the workplace only because women are forced by high childcare costs to leave. That's not true equality, is it?