Listen to thisAUSTRALIA
We cannot continue on the quiet about suicidal behaviour – it is on the increase. It is estimated that daily a thousand Australians think about suicide. It is only going to get worse. Why? Contextually, we are doing ever so little about suicide prevention – and a good part of suicide prevention is improving the lot people live within.
The causes to suicide are multifactorial but the major underlying factor in far too many suicides is extreme poverty. This continent’s First Peoples are dying by suicide at among the world’s highest suicide rates. Their poverty is a racialised one. When we disaggregate demographically, we find the Kimberley’s First Peoples and far north Queensland’s First Peoples are dying of suicide at the world’s highest rates.
Why are the suicide rates of First Peoples so disproportionately high? The suicide high risk regions are among the nation’s poorest regions. Homeland communities have been degraded by one government after another – catapulted into extreme poverty, marginalised. Their social health is among the worst in the world. Australia ranks second behind Norway on the United Nations Development Program’s Human Index for public health. In disaggregating the measurable indicators within that index, standalone to Australia’s First Peoples, their public health quotient ranks equivalent to 132nd.
The only solution to radically reduce community distress, social ills, self-destructive behaviour is to address the inequalities dished out to the majority of homelands and their communities. Improving the lot of communities to an equivalency of social wealth and social infrastructure to non-Aboriginal communities will overnight reduce the social ills, self-destructive behaviour and suicide rates and more than likely to parity with non-Aboriginal Australia.
Unless we turn to honesty then the ways forward will continue to be denied.
I am tired of all the people and sadly of many leaders who hijack agendas to push themselves into a little limelight. Do they not understand they are playing with people’s lives – in delivering more narratives of human misery and suffering? I abhor the conduct of those who bring on reports and research with great fanfare, as if they have delivered the people to the Elysian, crossed the Rubicon. I abhor people who pull up some piecemeal step as if panacea when it is not, when at best it is only a step in a right direction. When we deceive, it comes at a huge price – it costs lives. For every life lost to suicide it is estimated there are 40 attempted suicides and thousands of hospital admissions for intentional self-harm.
Where poverty is the major factor to a majority of suicides then it must be said so. We cannot forever drop the mantra of self-responsibility on people who are in dangerous despair, who feel all is hopeless, who see only the bleakest horizons. We must speak the truth at all times because in the truth lay the solutions. Where there is inequality the solution is equality. Where there is marginalisation the solution is redress. Where there is extreme poverty the solution is in reducing this poverty, in improving the social health of the community.
When children are born into impoverished communities and they grow up to see that the impoverishment is limited to the communities of First Peoples then they know their poverty, their predicament is racialised. They feel the racism. They live the racism and the haunting. Their identity is a liability – they live the oppression.
Self-destructive and suicidal behaviours are responsible for more hospitalisations and for the descent into more social ills than by any other behaviour. Suicidal behaviour is associated with unhappiness. I argue that therefore the majority of suicidal behaviour is preventable. I would argue that suicide and suicidal behaviour are the major health problems society face but of all our major health problems suicidal behaviour is the most preventable. Yet adequate investment in suicide prevention is not prioritised by governments. Where causality is limited to relationship and social factors and to vulnerable individuals’ sense of feelings of hopelessness, the descent into a sense of entrapment and the responsive trait of impulsivity, then this behaviour can be significantly addressed by positive mentoring.
But we must also understand that the majority of people living in the most impoverished circumstances can only adjust their behaviours to a certain point. Third-world-akin poverty in this wealthiest of nations must be addressed. Social health and mental health go side by side.
Their communities must not be shut down and their identity made a liability forever more. Their communities must be graced with equality.
Unhappiness is something that can be addressed holistically rather than it being compartmentalised as some sort of mental disorder manifestation and as of runaway risk factor to mental disorders. Unhappiness is a manifestation. The prevalence of suicide and suicidal behaviour is higher in high and middle income nations as opposed in low income nations. Similarly, rates of reported depressions and of hospitalisations from self-harm are higher in high and middle income nations. Life stresses that lead to suicidal behaviour in some cultures do not lead to suicidal behaviour in other cultures. Therefore the context of our meanings and our support groups are pivotal.
The outlier in the above commentary is that of discriminated minorities and peoples. In nations, especially high and middle income nations, with relatively recent colonial oppressor histories, the descendants of First Peoples have been degenerated to discriminated minorities. Unless the descendants of First Peoples accepted the diminution of their various cultural content and bow down to the impost of hard edged assimilation they consequently experience the deep sense of discrimination.
This goes to the heart of identity, to self-worth and esteem and hence their historical and contemporary identities are vulnerable to a belief that they are a liability. These disaggregated groups have the world’s highest rates of depressions, unhappiness, self-harms, suicidal behaviour and suicides. It is all about identity, whether for a vulnerable child, young adult, cultural group – the answers lay in respecting one another, being there for the other, empowering each other through meanings, relationships, freedoms and attitudinally.
Suicide prevention is about the positive self and any comprehensive response includes everyone. But for those who are marginalised in an otherwise wealthy meritocratic society, marginalised in extreme poverty, meritocracy is a nightmare. Social health is about equality. Helping people in extremely disparate circumstances is tough. A comprehensive national response for suicide prevention requires understanding the above. Loose understandings will tighten if we begin to understand that the majority of suicidal behaviours are directly linked to trauma and unhappiness – to situational events. Contexts and understandings can be changed before dangerous reliefs from substance abusing are sought or before serious mental disorders set in.
The point is that suicides, our leading cause of violent deaths, which receive relative little mention in the news, are the most preventable violence. Self-destructive behaviours that can culminate in suicidal behaviours and distress families and communities are in fact a leading cause of familial breakdowns. Once again, the point is that this behaviour is the most preventable of the various destructive behaviours that impact families and communities. These need to be prioritised in national conversations, by the media, by our governments.
The truth must be spoken at all times and the agenda to address social ills must not be hijacked by those who do not really know what they are talking about but somehow want to make a difference.
Where equality is denied it must be fought for. Where the communities of First Peoples have been degraded by governments, denied an equivalency of social health and to the point they have become dysfunctional then that racism must be called and redress demanded. Where communities need to be resourced so all the functions of a community shall prevail then this must be done; they must be able to function on a 24/7 basis, with prevention, intervention, postvention and with self-determination. People need people, we need one another – this is validation, this is empowerment.
I have written more than 200 articles on the suicide crisis – a humanitarian crisis – and on suicide prevention. It is not that I want to keep on writing these articles but I have to. Governments have been responding to what I have been writing but the responses are only steps in some of the right directions. Despite all the good works behind the scenes, we cannot stop, not at this most dangerous of times, this dangerous crossroad where this humanitarian crisis may finish up with catastrophic consequences if not adequately addressed. I have to keep on writing these articles and keep on visiting the many communities I journey to right across this continent, till at long last the moral abomination of so many children, youth and adults dying by suicide, when they are so avoidable, no longer remains haunting.
I have had to stare into the eyes of far too many who have lost a family member to suicide, into the eyes of mothers and fathers who have lost their child to suicide. In the last year we have buried an eleven year old taken by suicide, of a twelve year old, of a thirteen year old, of a fourteen year old, of fifteen year olds, of sixteen year olds, of seventeen year olds, of eighteen year olds. They should have lived long lives, fulfilled lives. Their parents, their siblings should not be grieving. For those born into racism, racialisation, born into extreme poverty – third-world-akin marginalisation – then society as a whole and not just our disingenuous governments alone should take responsibility.
As a society as a whole we should be fired up about improving the lot of others, about saving lives; what greater legacy is there than the common good.
by Gerry Georgatos
28 June 2015
