Suicide Prevention Day

Too much silence

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Their faces appeared on the screen before us in the sun-lit atrium of City Hall, one after the other, male and female, young and old, mostly smiling and congruous with the gorgeous late-summer day, but incongruous with the pain in the room. Many of those assembled were weeping; the faces appearing on the screen were the faces of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and parents now gone, gone because their burden of pain had become too heavy to bear, and they'd put it down.

They'd put their burden down and passed it on to those who love them, who now carry both the pain of searing loss, and the one of knowing the magnitude of their loved one's pain.

The September 11 event, which took place the day following World Suicide Prevention Day, was the doing of Edmonton's Support Network. The scene in the atrium was the last leg of a morning of remembering. It had begun with an outdoor ceremony in Sir Winston Churchill Square that included words and music from some of the guests, a short and sombre placard-carrying walk around City Hall, a ceremonial releasing of doves, and finally a piper leading us through the square and into City Hall. Inside, over lunch, Dr. Raj Sherman eloquently addressed those assembled, and then on the screen we saw the faces of those we'd lost.

What I learned from the placards carried by those walking was that more Albertans die by suicide than by car accidents each year. That in Canada, suicide is the leading cause of death in men aged 25 – 44. That Alberta's suicide rate is higher than that of other Canadian provinces. That Canada recorded 33 396 suicide deaths between 2000 and 2007.

At home, I checked a couple of other disease mortality numbers: 3120 cervical cancer deaths for the same period (based on an estimated 390 annual deaths), and 964 AIDS deaths (according to a 2007 Public Health Agency of Canada Surveillance Report). The relative absence of media coverage of events such as the Support Network's suicide awareness march is striking.

I think we're silent about suicide for a million reasons. We're uncomfortable thinking about it. We recognize desperate hopelessness in ourselves and our loved ones at times, and it scares us. We don't want to admit our conflicted feelings about suicide—it's not a victimless act, and though most of us are aware that those who take their own lives are victims, we're also aware that they leave victims in their wake.

I think we're silent because we're not sure we have any good solutions. There are those who advocate medicating all strong feelings of hopelessness, but we're also becoming very aware that emphasizing the link to mood disorders is problematic—we're already over-medicated, and the applicable meds themselves are linked to suicide risks.

I think we're silent because we don't want to admit that suicide rates are an indicator of the overall well-being of society. If we focused on that we'd be compelled to address the social problems of marginalization due to ethnicity or sexuality. We'd have to talk about the effects of school bullying, rape and domestic abuse. We'd have to talk about a productivity-oriented society that expects us to bounce back from loss or trauma faster than we're actually wired to do. We'd have to talk about a society that has little tolerance for the less-than-able, those who don't fit into our 50-hour work weeks or narrow definitions of success and beauty and value.

We'd have to talk about the problems of a survival-of-the-fittest economic system, and our own culpability. About job losses, financial pressures and our general anxiety and stress and sense of futility. We'd have to talk about the problem of hungry brains, brains craving omega 3s no longer abundant in our meat and dairy supply and micronutrients no longer abundant in our soil, about how we're poisoning our home.
And then, if we talked about those things, we'd be faced with the fact that we as a society don't always care enough to do the right thing, a society that doesn't necessarily want to invest in problems that cost much to fix and don't fit well into a business and profit-oriented society. V

Well, Well, Well

Suicide Prevention Day

Too much silence

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