The real reason we never want to mention suicide in NZ
Suicide stats were quietly released this week.
Like a cultural scab we no longer pick at because the shame is too great and the weeping wound too painful to even acknowledge.
New Zealand suicide rate remains unchanged in latest data
The number of lives lost to suspected suicides has increased in the past year, rising from 551 in year to June 2022 to 565 the following year.
The data, released today by the chief coroner for the year to June 2023, shows the suspected suicide rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people or 565. This compares with 10.5 per 100,000 or 551 people in the year prior
Acting director of the Suicide Prevention Office Dr Sarah Hetrick said suicide had a devastating impact on whānau and reducing the rates required a government-wide response that addressed structural determinants such as poverty, racism, discrimination and post-colonial legacy.
The horror of our suicide rate gives us a glimpse behind the ‘she’ll be right’ facade of our culture and the dark torment of an alpha male macho mental landscape that is terribly fragile.
Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society and the shame of suicide continues to hide and smother any healing.
In a society that has no religious faith and all the cultural maturity of a can of coke, the bonds which keep us attached are frail and disconnected. In our fetishisation of individualism we have lost the central part of the human condition – connection.
We have traded in our interwoven threads of whanau, friendship and kin for a race where no one wins.
The reason we can’t talk about suicide is because we can’t stand to talk about the dark treacle of self hate and loneliness at the core of consumer culture. We don’t dare confront the hollowness of our existence on these far flung crags of rock for fear of what we will reveal about ourselves.
Damaged individuals competing for a self identity too fragile for the storms and tempests of life.
Thanks to neoliberalism, we are further from each other than ever before.
Look at the manner in which our suicide rates jumped after the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, where we moved away from the communal towards the individual…
…we huddle frightened on these lonely rocks at the end of the world and slowly one by one slip off into the swallowing dark. Until we are prepared to confront many of the individualism-over-all myths and rebuild our tattered communities, our suicide rate will remain reminding us of our whispered deceptions.
We refuse to ask the why of suicide because we are too frightened to know the answer is a reflection of the shallow and lonely community we have become. Instead we reel off a list of phone numbers whenever we dare mention suicide as if that means a fucking thing.
We are broken and no one wants to admit that.
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Maybe next year you could chuck in an international comparison.
That graph is stark. Our family personally know 5 in the last 15 years 3 of whom were guys under 25. Over my whole life its 9. Two of which could be considered copying.
Don’t talk about it in the news because there is an academic work about social contagion in a Pacific Island village. But it’s evident from our lives social contagion or copy cat suicide is prevalent anyway so shouldn’t a ‘sudden death’ and its reasons be newsworthy and talked about? When it is talked about its the individuals depression or bullying or lack of “resilience”. It’s never loneliness or finances or unemployment or society not providing the person a legitimate role or loser culture or loss of children or stupid 27 club or guilt or sexual abuse or societal shame or no religion prohibiting it.
I have only distantly known a few people who committed suicide & it always bugged me afterward that maybe I should have made more effort to know them. We live in a society where it is considered normal to not care about people you don’t know & that continually exalts successful people (sport, wealth, academics) so it is easy to see how people who are struggling can feel alone which is obviously the very worst way for them to be.
Neo Liberalism is and has been a long term slowly building project by the usual suspects and many devious and morally corrupt policies have been installed to deliberately undermine men’s role in work and society to
grind away at the financials of the male workforce to lower wages and increase company profits. A whole tranche of men’s privileges enjoyed by many generations have gone by design to keep the man down and his income especially. I believe the usual suspects having successfully achieved their goals many years ago have been targeting women in recent years for the same purposes.
+100
90% of suicide is caused by hopelessness. Housing hopelessness to be more accurate. Some ppl collect houses, the government makes them much richer, they are forever protected, someone who just wants one home is held down through higher rents. Trust me, the only thing that has ever made me slightly consider ending it all has been because I cannot get into my own home. The threat and actuality from being thrown out of my rental is crushing, I need my dog with me as he is the only thing that gets me through. Landlords don’t want dogs. Obviously, landlords don’t even want me, they just want my money. Now we have a man with a $16 million property portfolio promising to make landlords lives much more fruitful, which means crushing my “type” further. Its hard. Especially when you know that they don’t care. They don’t care if I do the deed. They just want more money for themselves and they don’t care who gets destroyed. That is not their problem. If I go they will be getting “ahead” that little bit further. The current greed psychopathy of the top 50% makes NZ and most of the world now a horrible place to be…. and yes, Labour was just as bad, if not worse. We need an dramatic and massive revolution to turn the system on its head. Let them feel how we feel so they can finally see…
We need to fix the root causes of suicide, not use the stats to plow millions of public funds into the so-called ‘mental health’ industry.
This woke post modern society doesn’t value men or anything masculine.
It’s that simple.
It’s people with set minds who can’t be bothered about others and produce knee-jerk opinions about troubling statistics that are a large part of the problem. Like yours kcco. Nothing is simple for humans and unfortunately if anyone thinks it is, then they have not delved into the matter, understood, really talked with people who aren’t coping with life.
I like Janis Ian’s At Seventeen about being young, unsure, isolated, not secure in oneself. Feelings – not hopeful about finding an enjoyable way of life, too much reliance on props such as drugs, not resilient to the vagaries of life and remaining reasonably cheerful, not inclined to take things to heart, imagine negativity from others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENJFvy3FUOY
So why is it at a similarly high *rate* to what it was in the mid-to-late 80s? Was society “woke” back then too?
Emile Durkhiem’s seminal work on anomie and suicide has an obvious application in the current NZ context.
As another message on here has already alluded to the impact of social contagion is the major risk associated with the open discussion of suicide – there has been a copy-cat impact identified in the research suggesting that more open and explicit discussion of suicide INCREASES the rate of suicide in that community – I know it seems counter-intuitive, but this is what research sometimes uncovers
Yes, it was. They called it political correctness. And they didn’t like free speech either