The dark side of keeping a ‘disgusted silence’
It is absolutely the princes’ duty to be talking about mental health
Tomorrow is World Suicide Prevention Day. I know, I know, it’s not the jaunty, cheery first sentence you wanted to read on a Saturday morning while you eat your toast and drink your tea or coffee and wonder whether to pop to Waitrose before or after lunch. Like all difficult subjects, suicide isn’t a topic that cheers the soul, which is why we don’t talk about it very much; perhaps if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend that it doesn’t exist – if a tree falls in the wood and nobody sees it, has it really happened, and so on and so on.
It is why, when you do talk about it, as Prince Harry and the his brother, the Duke of Cambridge, have done extensively over the past year, some wag will pop up and tell you to pipe down.
The princes have received quite a lot of stick in some quarters for talking about their – gasp! – feelings, with “seasoned” royal experts (I’ve always preferred mine unseasoned) noting that the very heart of the monarchy is found in its stiff upper lip. Those seasoned royal experts, currently covered in some bitter and piny thyme, had another pop at Prince Harry this week when, on a visit to meet young people working to prevent suicide in Northern Ireland, he noted that “the older generation have had it one way and handed… the bad habits down to all of us, the younger generation”.
He was talking about bottling up mental health issues, of course, a thorny issue that seems to divide humans depending on whether or not they have an emotional IQ over 10.
(See Andrew Tate, the world champion kick-boxer, who this week caused a storm on Twitter after he said that depression isn’t real: “You feel sad, you move on… most ‘depressed’ people are unhappy with their lives, too lazy to change it.”)
Some people are obsessed with having a stiff upper lip to the point that I worry about them developing face ache (I find that life is much easier when you just relax your mouth). Those “Keep calm and carry on” signs are irritating partly because of their ubiquity, but mostly because they assume that calm is an easy state to reach, even if anxiety seems to be dragging through you like nails on a blackboard.
I have quite a simple riposte to those who think that it is unseemly for the princes to be discussing girlie emotions: of course, “dignified” silences were the order of the day for the royals when the biggest killer of young men in this country was the Nazis – but now that it is suicide, I’d argue that it is absolutely their duty to be talking about these things.
Anyway, I suspect that this is an argument we will be having for a bit longer. Though figures published by the National Office of Statistics this week show that the suicide rate in Britain has fallen to its lowest rate since 2011, rates are rising for young women, and it is still the biggest killer of young men in the UK.
The drop in figures is thanks to the stellar work done by charities such as Calm (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) and the Samaritans (you can call them free, day or night, on 116 123). The campaigning by the likes of the young royals will also have made a huge impact.
This week, the biggest song in the world – bigger than Taylor Swift or Katy Perry – is one about mental health, by a rapper called Logic. The records’s title, 1-800-273-8255, is the phone number of the American suicideprevention hotline.
Things are undoubtedly getting better, but there is still a long way to go.
We still need to improve mental health provision in this country, and be a bit more nuanced than simply blaming the state of the world on social media. We need to accept that there is not suddenly an epidemic of mental illness – just an increase in awareness of it, leading to more reporting of it, which is, I think, a good thing. We need to stop saying that people have “committed” suicide, as if they were criminals and not desperately ill people in need of help. The only criminal thing here is the culture of silence we have created over the years, a culture that leads people to suffer completely needlessly.
So yes, tomorrow is World Suicide Prevention Day. This year, let’s honour all those who have died by their own hand by talking about them; by discussing this thing that will only get better if we talk about it.