There is a poster visible from the Richmond train station, it turns to reveal one side and then the other. “Alcohol does not cause violence” it broadcasts as it spins. An unequivocal statement I recognise as familiar, being from the “Guns don’t shoot people” genre.

The annoying billboard creates a squall in my head by claiming there is no causal relationship between alcohol and violence. I thought alcohol use was associated with all kinds of violence, but I could have assumed wrongly, or maybe I have listened to too many news story beat ups attributing social problems to alcohol use or perhaps it is convenient to explain away problems by blaming something. I ask my friend Google for clarification and Google provided a review of the scientific literature on the relationship between alcohol and violence.

I know, I know I can’t believe everything I read on the internet – or a billboard for that matter – and this review is well credentialed, coming out of the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, and Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, California

The researchers, Robert Nash Parker and Kathleen Auerhahn, conclude that “… consistent finding that we can report from this review of the empirical evidence is that when violent behavior is associated with a substance, that substance is, overwhelmingly, alcohol. Study after study indicates that,even in samples containing relatively high baseline rates of illicit drug use,violent events are overwhelmingly more likely to be associated with the consumption of alcohol than with any other substance” They don’t make a causal link between alcohol and violence, more empirical tests and data are needed. “Much work is yet to be done, but the prospects for greater understanding of how and why alcohol and drugs contribute to violence have never been brighter.” Maybe I should have searched for further other studies but as I am debating with a billboard I have sufficient information to doubt its veracity.

…and the billboard spins around “Blame and punish the individual.” it says. That’s when I start to get anxious about when my train will arrive and put some distance between me and the billboard. That is quite a statement and presumably the anonymous body or individual responsible for the billboard are suggesting that violent, and intoxicated and violent, individuals are blamed and punished, the intoxicated non-violent and sober individuals are off the hook for now.

I don’t know enough about the psychodynamics of addiction. I doubt blame and punishment will address the implied problem, and the idea that this be used as an approach bruises my empathetic heart. Back to Google and a search on “blame and punish the individual”. No matches from the Academics at the Presley Center but I am relieved to find local support from others who have posted about being affronted by the same billboard.

As well as collective outrage it has prompted thoughts about collective responsibility around alcohol and violence. I am smiling now…and my train is pulling in.

On Sunday after sitting through a 90 minute movie and enjoying a coffee I had a natural urge to go. As the door swung closed behind me and I was stifled by a synthetic floral stink, one of those unnatural bouquets, worse than any commonplace lavatory stench. My olfactory sensibilities were heightened and when I noticed the the advertising poster on the back of the door other sensitivities were insulted by what I read: “Depression and anxiety – it’s not a normal part of getting older.”

Really? While I might not take much pleasure in aging, and even seek treatment for any accompanying depression and anxiety, I find the suggestion that these states are not normal is offensive.

The poster was a little on-the-nose. My photograph doesn’t really do it justice but it does capture how dank my mood became, in the cinema toilets on that sunny Sunday.

As in evidenced by this blog, I do tend to side with darker outlooks and I would even argue that anxiety and depression are pervasive, if not commonplace, as we age. Normal. We are complex and multi-faceted beings and our thinking around what is normal can be too constrained, too narrow to accommodate experiences that might be unwelcome but are nonetheless characteristic of the human condition.

On one hand we are encouraged to celebrate diversity and accept what is different, rare, or unconventional. On the other hand if the very thing that is unusual is in some way dark or uncomfortable and can be medicated into abeyance, then it is labelled abnormal and that’s troubling – if not just plain wrong.

I wonder what hue I would be if I had only been coloured in with happy normal shades?

Thoughts of normal and abnormal cause me to wonder about being only normal and how I might be burdened with common, conventional, expected, standard, usual, and I would miss my quirky.

I have learned more from my experiences, both challenging and fabulous, than from any other form of education. I believe joys would be less joyous without knowing sorrows and that I would be less normal without my abnormal.

Thankfully the same article talks about changes in police training, “Under the new training police are being instructed to identify signs of depression and paranoia and are being taught to develop a rapport with people suffering mental issues.”

It is no surprise to me that police “…have found that the traditional authoritarian approach can escalate issues resulting in a disproportionate reliance on force to deal with irrational offenders.”

Another story by the same journalist and published the same day states that “Police are trained to take control in potentially violent situations. There is an escalating scale of responses, beginning with an assertive approach followed by aggressive commands. If the situation deteriorates, then police may use threats (”Back off now or you’ll be in the back of the van”) and, if all else fails, they can use force. But these ”we’re the boss” tactics can go horribly wrong if the subject is not rational. As police ramp up their response, the confused person on the other side sees only a threat. Too often the endplay can be fatal.”

I am glad John Silvester, a respected journalist, has covered the issue, pointing out that people with mental health issues are over represented as the targets of crime and as crime offenders.

There has to be a better way.

Imagine if police responded less to what people say and listen for the feeling in tense or confronting situations. They might hear angst or desperation and they might handle things differently.

*Help Police – the first post on this topic July last year

He was attracting a lot of attention because of his behaviour, which like I said was nothing short of extraordinary. He was enraged and cursing. I’m trying to find the adjectives to describe the livid man’s behaviour. He was furious, fierce, and frenzied, as he shouted a storm of abuse. He was frightening, I found his display incredibly intimidating – not to mention jaw-droppingly astounding.

The business man had been issued a parking ticket and the target of his abuse was a City Parking Officer. Nobody likes getting a parking ticket but the circumstances did not in anyway mitigate the demented character’s demonstration. I was appalled.

I couldn’t help thinking how another man acting in the same way might have been detained and perhaps forcibly restrained, physically or with medication. The scene could have played out differently had the lead actor not been dressed as he was, or if the angry man had been denigrating and the world at large rather than berating a Parking Officer, as indefensible as berating anyone is.

The themes and feelings that were expressed of guilt, loss and not understanding, were familiar. There were two points that caused me to call out with a mix of outrage and distress. One was the suggestion that suicide was a selfish act and narcissistic. Three or four recent posts here have been devoted to exploring that view. I don’t seek enlightenment, per se, but I am looking for greater understanding, and empathy.

The other point that brought a strangled sort of howl of ‘No…” from me was when someone suggested that making a suicidal person an involuntary patient saved lives. Saving lives maybe a noble cause but not while removing every gram of self in the process. I couldn’t quite believe that such an oppressive action was possible, involuntary detention is used in the USA and now I know that similar action is also codified in law in Australia.

I am outraged and distressed that someone can be taken into custody and subject to treatment against their will. That this sort of action is deemed to be for their own good, and the very system set up to provide support. Whose good does that serve?

I am outraged that someone who has lost hope can also be made helpless, powerless, and be so disregarded.

I am also indebted to the person who left a comment, on another post, explaining how that combination of hopelessness and helplessness can motivate acts of suicide.

I think of how ill my mother was with an undiagnosed cancer last year and the efforts of my sisters to support her at home until she relented and reluctantly agreed to go to hospital. We wouldn’t we have forced her into treatment, not for her own good or for ours.

At work, where I am responsible for delivering training, I occasionally come up against a corporate imperative to make attendance at training sessions compulsory, and it makes me a little bit ill. I won’t make training compulsory. If somebody wants to come to training I am pleased, and if they don’t I trust they are managing their own learning and career needs. I can try to entice them by making the training more interesting, more relevant, more compelling and delicious but I do not want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there.

I don’t feel that allowing the space for self determination makes me a ‘patsy’, a loser. I don’t feel diminished by allowing someone else to hold onto their own power and the right (it is a right) of self determination. We have choices, each of us must be able to exercise our own power of choice in regard to our needs and treatment.

This is an instance where I can not appreciate or support what was expressed, however well intentioned some are about forcing others into treatment. No. I am one-sided on this issue.

It’s a difficult impassioned discussion.

I know that something shared by those who’ve had someone close to them die by suicide is the struggle to make sense of something seemingly senseless. I’ve heard many speak of the ongoing guilt of not having been able to help more.

All of the scenarios that haunt you in bereavement start with ‘if’ and ‘why’.

Living with loss is difficult, the wound is indelible.

Living with depression can be even more unbearable, I think of William Styron’s description, found in the Wonderer’s Heart archives, of the “gray drizzle of horror” he recorded as “totally removed from normal experience”. No wonder suicide is unfathomable to those who have not suffered through a severe depression.

Then there is the another pained and moving view, like that described by Gabrielle Carey in an article from May 11 2009.

It is said that for every suicide, on average there are eight people left behind who are seriously and often permanently damaged. When it comes to my father’s suicide, I am one of those eight. Twenty-one years later I have concluded that suicide is — not always but often — an act of anger and revenge; ultimately an act of selfishness.

… I have had many years to contemplate how I might have prevented my father’s death. By forcing him to see a doctor (he hated doctors) who might have prescribed anti-depressants? That might have seen him through the worst of his depression and then out the other side. But what if the doctor had recommended a psychiatrist? And what if the psychiatrist had recommended scheduling him because he was clearly such a high suicide risk? Would the family have agreed to admitting him, against his will, so that he could be monitored day and night? Would we have been able to save him from himself? I don’t know. But I suspect that, if someone had walked into my father’s house at the right moment, and had seen the rope he was preparing, had realised the extreme torment he was suffering, and had taken him by the hand, led him away, talked to him, kept him close, told him that he was loved and wanted and needed, he might well still be here today. I also suspect he would have wanted that. That he would have enjoyed getting to know his five grandchildren. But, of course, I don’t know for sure.

Unlike my father, whose final act I now consider to be cowardly and selfish, when my mother was suffering intensely she behaved quite differently.

Gabrielle Carey. (May 11 2009). You do not have the right to die. In The Age On-line. Retrieved May 27 2011, from http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/you-do-not-have-the-right-to-die-20090510-az6t.html.

I understand that I don’t understand.

Getting ‘a grip’ is one person’s view based on her experience. Her full article from the UK Daily Mail is published here.

Whatever might be worth reading in the article, the portrayal of the sad faced clown leaves me speechless.

If anybody doubted the stigma attached to metal health look at the photo on the article and doubt no more. Whatever helpful advice or message might be contained in the article are lost on me – I feel so alienated by the layout and image that I can’t read it.

I hardly even know what to say, this newspaper page is so wrong… and such an unfair stigmatising portrayal of depression.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.
Link to the photo source

Tsk.

The noise just escapes harried countenances who feel inconvenienced by a step I take or a move I make. Tsk makes me feel guilty for being in the way. I can’t help feeling pricked by the sharp tsk of someone’s misdirected annoyance. It stings and I feel annoyed.

I read the tsks yesterday when someone walked in front of a train, suicide during peak hour.

In no time twitter lit up with a number of tsk tsks. Passengers were held up as trains stopped running, and some roads near the city were closed. Tsk. People were annoyed that “all it takes is one suicide to bring the traffic to a standstill“, and this one “what is with the trains…a suicide.”

A suicide? Tsk. How annoying, such an inconvenience.

Today a news report, “A man found injured on the Eastern Freeway on Saturday morning, and who later died, may have been lying on the road when he was hit by a car.”

I was dismayed to read this TSK from the friend of a friend published on facebook;

“Would like to thank the silly person who tried to take their life on the eastern freeway this morning. As if an hour drive to work during peak hour isn’t enough…. Seriously an hour and half drive to work on a Saturday is not ok by me. So thanks for making me late. Oh and one last thing if I knew who you were I’d smash you.”

Shit-loads of empathy, is how I describe those reactions.
Too horrible. What happened a bit of to ‘he ain’t heavy he’s my brother’ attitude?
All very well as long as I’m not on my way to work?

Elizabeth Wurtzel doesn’t pin down a cause of depression, what she does is describe the burden, it’s overarching breadth and seemingly bottomless depth of the affliction. I believe understanding depression and people afflicted by depression, people Wurtzel describes as the walking waking dead, a greater priority than suicide prevention. To me, prevention is not a position to start from, it sets up an adversarial (helping?) relationship between preventer and the suicidal. Ready for battle? Building understanding is my preference.

This is one of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s descriptions of what depression can look like from the inside:

“… Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he’ll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.”

Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir, Elizabeth Wurtzel

A dear friend told me the same thing, gradually and then suddenly, that was her experience. In retrospect I can see the same in Mottsu and how he lived and left, it helps me to know that. That simple statement does more to encourage understanding and support depression than any number of world-wide prevention days.

Apparently figures report that more Australians die by suicide than die due to road accidents. I am startled as I recall that suicide statistics are widely regarded as under-reported. It is accepted that many more die by suicide than is recorded, and the misrepresentation in reporting is largely for reasons around the unwanted stigma of suicide for affected families.

In taking to task the misguided reticence of newspapers to publish suicide statistics, Professor McGorry said “People aren’t aware of these facts and figures because of this shroud of silence over this issue.”

I support Professor McGorry’s stance that, “It should be on the news every night. There should be a toll on the front of every newspaper, every day.”

In effect someone dies of suicide every four hours, the real hidden toll is the destructive affect on family members and friends. The more we talk about suicide the more understanding can be shared and the more support and treatment options can be openly discussed.

“May you live all the days of your life.” Jonathan Swift