Madam, – I am in bright sunny coffee shop in Dublin. It is 10.30am and I feel tears welling up inside me and a cold shiver throughout my entire body. I have just read Carl O’Brien’s suicide story for November 17th. It has instantly transported me back to February 2004, when I, like young Shane D’Alton, was admitted to a psychiatric unit in a Dublin public hospital. His father, Eddie’s harrowing description of what he encountered and comparison of it to a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest mirror my experience exactly four years earlier.
I too had health insurance, yet I also encountered a disorganised environment without empathy or pity and devoid of all hope.
I survived despite, not because of the system.
So I ask a simple question. When is the health system going to take this matter seriously, take action and stop using ministers and spin-doctors to tell stories while people are dying in our communities? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – To de-moralise as well as de-criminalise suicide, why not use “suicide” as a verb as well as a noun? The Romans invented it for use as a verb, which is why “sui-cide” literally means ‘self-kill’ in Latin. We could, then, say a person suicided, that is, self-killed.
It’s true that the Romans believed that death ended life and, therefore, that the killing of one’s body killed one’s entire self. Not all of us today believe that. – Yours, etc,