{"id":1809,"date":"2017-01-06T17:14:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T17:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/?p=1809"},"modified":"2017-10-04T09:08:30","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T08:08:30","slug":"the-politics-of-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/the-politics-of-suicide\/","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of Suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last few weeks have seen public policy on suicide prevention climb the political agenda. Ian Marsh<\/a> and Anne Cooke<\/a> consider whether anything new is on offer.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

On Monday Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister, will make a speech<\/a> promising to improve mental health services and to reduce the suicide rate.\u00a0 The speech is, in part, a response to recommendations from NHS England\u2019s mental health taskforce, and to the House of Commons Health Committee\u2019s \u00a0interim report<\/a> on suicide prevention published just before Christmas. \u00a0Whilst we welcome a renewed focus on suicide, we worry that (if you will excuse a macabre pun) the Government are flogging a dead horse. The central thrust of the proposals seems to be that we need to keep on doing what we\u2019ve been doing (unsuccessfully) for decades, only more of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The main assumption underlying the Prime Minister\u2019s speech and the Health Committee report seems to be that people who kill themselves are mentally ill. \u00a0It\u2019s an idea that\u2019s dominated our thinking on suicide prevention for a long time. As a consequence, many of us have come to see suicide as an individual mental health problem and the job of mental health services as identifying and \u2018managing\u2019 those at risk. While this has some value, there are some big problems with it too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first \u2013 and this is a pretty important one – is that it often doesn\u2019t work. A recent review<\/a> in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that suicide is inherently unpredictable, and that the usual response of admitting people to hospital, and observing them, against their will if necessary, prevents very few deaths. While preventing any<\/em> deaths is obviously desirable, the review also pointed out that a heavy-handed response has its own risks. It\u2019s important to think about the distress caused by detaining, observing and often medicating thousands of people unnecessarily: especially when the preventive value is so questionable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second problem with seeing suicide as an individual mental health problem is that it distracts us from what could <\/em>make a difference: namely addressing the circumstances of people\u2019s lives, such as unemployment or poverty, that are often what lead us to be so desperate that we consider taking our own lives. \u00a0In paying so little attention to these, and to the social and political contexts that give rise to them, current proposals are like exhortations to mop a floor faster while ignoring the source of a leak.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And our life circumstances really matter. The Government\u2019s \u2018Mental Health and Wellbeing in England<\/a>\u2019 report found something rather staggering: nearly half of all people in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance (a benefit for people unable to work because of poor health or disability) had attempted suicide. The report sees this as an example of the role played by \u2018socioeconomic adversity\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The possible role of the Government\u2019s own policies is noticeably absent from the discussion.\u00a0 So, for example, whilst Theresa May and the Commons Health Committee discuss mental health in schools, neither acknowledge the toxic emotional environment that current education policy is creating in many schools. The emphasis on competition and repeated testing is one of the things that has prompted a group of over 250 experts to write to national newspapers warning the \u2018death of childhood\u2019<\/a>. Instead, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wants schools to seek advice from local mental health \u2018experts\u2019, and teachers to be trained in spotting \u2018telltale signs\u2019 in students.\u00a0 Along similar lines, the recent Health Committee report recommended training benefits assessors in \u2018mental health first aid<\/a>\u2019 to help them recognise possible symptoms in benefits claimants. Again, no mention is made of the distress caused<\/em><\/a> by benefits assessment systems, or by the reductions in welfare spending of which they are a part.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The rising rate of suicide in prisons is touched on in the Health Committee report but there is little analysis of possible reasons for this, such as reductions in funding and staffing levels and increasing overcrowding. \u00a0Neither does the Committee mention the possible effects of cuts in public spending and increases in economic inequality, even though the report\u2019s main graph shows a sharp increase in suicide rates since 2008<\/a> and the financial crash.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Government has said that a \u2018refresh\u2019 of its suicide prevention strategy will be published in January 2017.\u00a0 What would be truly refreshing would be an acknowledgement that depression, despair and suicide aren\u2019t just individual \u2018mental health problems\u2019 that afflict us out of the blue.\u00a0 They are often responses to the events and circumstances of our lives: the very things that wider government policy affects so profoundly.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It you are feeling suicidal you can contact The Samaritans here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ian Marsh<\/a> is a Senior Lecture in the Canterbury Christ Church University, <\/em>School of Allied Health Professions. He has written extensively about suicide and suicide prevention. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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