Reluctance to record those who take own life ‘lets everyone down’
A CONSULTANT psychiatrist believes Britain’s cultural reticence towards suicide is failing those who resort to taking their own lives.
Dr Walter Busuttil, who is also the medical director for the Combat Stress charity, told The Yorkshire Post the current way of recording the deaths of those who commit suicide is letting down everyone in the country, not just former military personnel.
He said: “In the UK, coroners are reluctant to call something a suicide unless it is obvious.
“They will often go with a narrative verdict.
“What this means is that we haven’t got any accurate information relating to the rate of suicides amongst anybody in this country.
“Other countries record more accurate suicide studies but the UK has a different system and we have a different culture and that is a big problem.
“Internationally, other countries can better monitor veteran suicides because their system is easier to interpret while ours is more complicated. It is cultural and indicative of the British stiff upper lip.
“We have a country that does not record suicides properly and if a veteran dies unnecessarily, we have failed that person but we don’t know the full picture when it comes to any suicides, not just veterans. It is a wider issue because of the recording of deaths in this country.
“(We) would like to see the way such deaths are recorded clarified and simplified to make it clearer as to what the real underlying rate of suicides is among veterans.”
Sue Freeth, the chief executive at Combat Stress, agreed that identifying patterns when it comes to ex-forces personnel killing themselves is unnecessarily complex owing to the way deaths are recorded.
She added: “The UK coroner system is peculiar and unlike any other country.
“There is not a mechanism we are aware of in England to accurately record the deaths of veterans by suicide so we don’t know if the rates are higher or lower than their civilian peers.”
She added: “We have got a lot of data about veterans but data about suicides of veterans is the missing piece of the jigsaw.”