Kenny speaks of the ‘Mutilating sadness’ of suicide

Taoiseach speaks of the ‘mutilating sadness’ of suicide


Kenny attends suicidology conference in Westport

TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has posed fundamental questions about the causes and impact of mental-health issues that afflict one-in-four of Irish citizens.
Speaking at the Irish Association of Suicidology 18th Annual Conference, held in Hotel Westport last week, Mr Kenny asked: “Are we ‘aware’ of our emotional and psychological wellness, or are we not? What actions do we take to mind ourselves when we feel our stores are running out? Do we have someone to turn to when we feel hunted by life? A trauma in the family? The death of a beloved? The loss of a job? An error of our past comes back to haunt us? Worry about work, bills, making ends meet?
“Or when depression imprisons us? Or anxiety tortures us? Or when loneliness devours our heart and soul, so the very essence of us feels every bit as starved as the endless days with their sly ambition to become a famished ‘forever’?”
He suggested that the while the concept of ‘suicide’ must not be examined solely within the parameters of ‘mental illness, without contextualising the influences of psychological and social wellness’, the reasons, often, for such devastating actions are often inexplicable.
Loving parents, families and communities may have carried out all the obvious ‘checks’ regarding problems with drugs, girlfriends, ‘issues’, and come up with no obvious ‘cause’.
 “And each and every ‘check’ is our hope. Because that check is how, in our vigilance, as good parents, good friends, we ‘vaccinate’ our own against suicide,” he said.
“None of these ‘checks’ applies to my people, they’re safe from suicide, it can never happen to them. Only we know, and to our abject horror, that it can and does. Either for a particular mix of reasons, in a particular life, on a particular day. Or sometimes, and with exquisite cruelty, it happens for what seems to be, no particular reason at all,” Mr Kenny said.
Ten people across Ireland take their own lives each week, Mr Kenny noted.
He explained that the Department of Health, the HSE and Gerry Raleigh of the National Office for Suicide Prevention are working on a new framework for a National Strategy for Action on Suicide Prevention for the period 2015-2018.
“A key aspect will be how we get rid of the stigma attached to both needing help and looking for it. In that regard, the women are doing better than the men,” he observed.
Speaking directly to the expert group, he concluded: “In my first speech as Taoiseach, I spoke about the old wisdom of how a wound heals from the edges in. Judging by our suicide figures there is not just a wounding, but a mutilating sadness in the lives of those who find themselves at the edge of society, the edge of coping and consequently in too many cases the edge of life itself. It is your work to unravel them and I wish you well.”