Voyeurism and compassion: who is really hurting Sinead?
The outpouring about Sinead O’Connor’s distressing video showed little understanding of the real situation, writes Donal Lynch
THE video which Sinead O’Connor posted this week on Facebook made for fairly excruciating viewing, not least because it seemed like so much history repeating.
There were the same recriminations, pleas and accusations that have characterised her written posts and private utterings for years now.
There was the familiar attempt to harness the power of the mass media in what is a deeply private matter; in 1993 it was a sprawling poem to her father spanning a page of The Irish Times; a quarter of a century later the medium is social media.
The new clip contained the same uncomfortable, but highly effective mixture of personal pain and public performance that made Sinead a global superstar.
Like the video for Nothing Compares 2 U it was beautifully lit, with jarring changes of register from sorrow to anger.
Instead of Paris in winter, this time she had the bad art of a New Jersey motel room as a backdrop — but the impact of the tears were as far reaching as ever. Within days it had been viewed by millions of people and written up in the media all over the world.
And Sinead got what she has always gotten: applause tinged with concern.
The Guardian thanked her for exposing “the messiness of mental illness”. The UK Independent lauded her for “stripping away the middle class worthiness around mental illness conversations”.
CNN lauded her bravery. The social campaigning that supposedly underscored the whole performance — she says she made the video to raise awareness — was accepted without question.
Eventually Annie Lennox weighed in and repeated the most damaging part of Sinead’s reproach to her family.
This, in the absence of any real understanding of the situation, is what counted as “compassion”.
As a friend and fan of Sinead, it felt slightly different. I don’t think that making an international media circus out of a painful and lonely moment counts as any sort of kindness to her — even if it appears that is what she wants. The shout outs this week from strangers like Tyson Fury and Fiona Apple might be a temporary relief but what she needs is the comfort of people close to her — that, after all, was what she was talking about in the video. She complained that mental illness “invalidates everything you feel, say and do” but her family have found themselves in an almost impossible position of being expected to give full credence to some things she says, but none to others: to ignore her abuse and often repeated statements to the effect she never wants to see them again and then a short time later accept her subsequent pleas for contact and care.
The predictable fallout from years of this impossible situation is what Sinead sums up as “abandonment”, and “stigma”.
In fact many hands have worked behind the scenes to pick up the pieces as her illness worsened.
Other friends and family members have tried to help over the years only to later see themselves publicly excoriated. Manager after manager got their marching orders — the latest one just a few days ago.
He, too, was portrayed by her as a saviour not long ago, last week he stood accused of “identity theft”. The number of behind-the-scenes feuds is countless.
Much of the video had the feel of a scene from Mommie Dearest; Sinead complained that fans on Facebook are kinder to her than her family, the Joan Crawford of the movie asked “why can’t you give me the respect I would get from any fan on the street?”
How would any of us feel? Sinead is a national treasure, so every flameout provokes more hand wringing. But it’s easy to feel “compassionate” towards someone you’ve never met and don’t really care about; it’s possibly much harder when you’re right in the thick of it, depending on this person for love and getting dressed down in front of millions. That is one kind of unbearable pressure but the threat of suicide — which Sinead makes very frequently — is another very painful and continuing aspect of this.
This has long been a problem for Sinead and those around her.
Experts say that the responsible way to handle this is to take each threat very seriously, to place the responsibility for living and dying back in the hands of the person making the threat, and to accept that even if you acquiesce, their problems will not be solved.
None of these nuanced approaches to the central subject of the video were even mentioned in the voluminous discussions in The Guardian and elsewhere last week. Instead they were lazily framed as being entirely about stigma and the victimisation of people with mental illness.
In fact the entity doing the real victimising is Facebook itself. The social media giant has shown that nothing is beneath it by allowing a self-confessed sufferer of mental illness, in the throes of a breakdown, to air private family law matters, involving young children, in full public.
The irony is that Sinead would be acutely aware of exploitation within the music industry but when she flays herself in public, it escapes her that the only winner is Facebook, which (for financial gain don’t forget) satisfies the morbid curiosity of millions while claiming it is but the conduit for the message.
Behind its protocols and procedures it shrugs like a publican serving a designated driver and then mainstream media piles on with voyeurism masquerading as principled concern.
One of the most often repeated questions about Sinead is: can the doctors or psychiatric profession not do something to help her?
This is where Sinead’s fame and wealth have hamstrung her. The doctors can be dismissed and replaced with a frequency that would be difficult for the average person.
The diagnoses change yearto-year and her celebrity enables her to continually rely on the kindness of strangers, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche was described by Keith Gaynor, an Irish expert on Borderline Personality Disorder — an illness Sinead said she had until this week — as a fictional embodiment of aspects of the condition).
Facebook serves as her own personal Black Mirror and the core responsibility for recovery is placed elsewhere, with other people.
Meanwhile, she is vulnerable to those who see an opening: last week Doctor Phil was the latest to offer to swoop in.
The pain of this story will continue, even if the Ballad of the Jersey Motel is not the first of many — there was already a new video by Saturday morning.
And as it unfolds we in the media will be presented with stark choices about how to cover and comment on it. (After she published the video itself, it took 48 hours of general journalistic hesitation last week before the Daily Mail dived in, opening the floodgates).
In considering this we might do well to remember that Sinead is so much more than the tabloid soap opera they have reduced her to.
She is a loving mother, daughter and friend, a tender and intelligent person, whose once-in-a-lifetime talent has enriched millions who have never met her.
It is beyond the power of any external individual to really solve her problems. Her healing must begin from within — if and when she finds the strength for that.
But in the meantime, those who have compassion have a duty to not participate in the finger pointing and the rest of the madness; Sinead deserves better than
that.
‘Many hands have worked behind the scenes to pick up the pieces’