It is a little reassuring about the possibilities for intelligence, humanity and courage in Irish politics to hear that Fine Gael TD Mr Brian Hayes has called on the Government to establish a commission on the status of men, with a particular brief to address the continuing epidemic of male suicides.
Mr Hayes was, I presume, responding to the reports on suicide in a recent edition of the Catholic magazine Reality, summarised in this newspaper on December 31st. In truth, there was little new in these articles, but they did a service in highlighting the fact that since 1990, there has been a fourfold increase in the number of deaths by suicide by men under 25. Suicide now kills more young men than accident or disease.
As it happens, there was an error in the Reality articles which may have diluted the significance of these figures. It was reported that there has been a fourfold increase in the overall suicide level since 1990. In fact, following steep rises over 20 years, the overall suicide rate appears to have remained more or less constant since the start of the 1990s. This puts the figures relating to young male suicides in even sharper relief.
The trend does not surprise me. We have a society which, out of a distorted sense of what it calls "compassion", seeks always to placate and nurture what it perceives as "minorities", but in each specific instance, these minorities are defined against a notional, unspecified majority, which is implicitly designated as being unworthy of compassion. When you subtract the women, children, blind, infirm, insane and elderly, you are left with adult males, implicitly and explicitly defined as the "oppressive majority".
Whereas our culture goes out of its way to tell young women on the verge of adulthood that they are by nature sensitive, caring, humane and compassionate, it tells its male young that they will grow up to be insensitive brutes, unworthy of sympathy or respect.
Young women are now offered multiple lifestyle choices between career and motherhood, workplace and home. Young men are told that they must make way for their hitherto disadvantaged sisters and, by way of compensation for the sins of their grandfathers, forgo the primal joy of fatherhood if that is what their womenfolk decide. Young men are told they must be strong unless where otherwise indicated, young women that the forces of the State and society will come to their rescue should anything go wrong.
This reality is reflected in the figures for both suicide and what is called "attempted suicide". Many more women than men actually attempt suicide, but many more men "succeed". In truth, they are two quite distinct phenomena: attempted suicide is a cry for help that almost certainly anticipates the relief of compassion; suicide is that act of someone who expects no help this side of the grave. In general, it is women who threaten to kill themselves and men who kill themselves. Manhood is an increasingly terminal condition.
Is it surprising that so many men, on the brink of the transition between childhood and adulthood, decide not to go on? As Schopenhauer put it: "It will generally be found that as soon as the terrors of life reach the point where they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life".
One of the traditional cop-outs about suicide has been that it is the consequence of mental illness. The purpose of emphasising this connection has been to spare the families of suicide victims, but also society at large, from the guilt arising from the accusation that a suicide might otherwise represent.
The idea that men are sicker than women would be grist to the mill of our present culture, but it is spurious. It is true that a proportion of suicide victims are people who have suffered from various mental disorders, but the vast majority have lived ostensibly normal lives; indeed, a common observation from family members of suicide victims is that they had no warning that anything was amiss. There have been strenuous attempts of late an attempt to create a causal link between suicide and what is called "depression".
Indeed, in an interview which formed part of the Reality investigation, Aware chairman Dr Patrick McKeon reiterated the conventional view that the vast majority of suicide victims have been suffering from "some underlying psychiatric problem, mainly depression or mood disorders". Unfortunately, this is generally as far as the headline writers seek to go. Later in the same interview, Dr McKeon spoke more specifically about the nature of what is called "depression".
"Human beings, to live with themselves," he said, "have a natural infusion of positive perspectives on things and that enables us to keep going in life. When that's taken away, that's actually called depression". And later: ". . . if anyone is really involved in life they are going to get depressed at some stage or other in their life. To anybody who says they don't get depressed . . . I say, are you really that switched off?"
This suggests that depression is not simply a clinical condition that descends on the individual like a virus. It is inextricably related to the external conditions of that human being's life and his perceptions of these. To say that suicide victims are depressed tells us nothing. It is a tautology. Everyone gets depressed, but not everyone commits suicide.
For a long time, it has been a central psychiatric belief that women have a greater tendency towards depression than men, yet many fewer women end up killing themselves. This suggests that suicide has much less to do with depression per se than with the external, i.e. societal, attitude to the depressed person. A depressed person who believes there is a listening ear out there is less likely to kill him or herself than one who believes there is not.
Suicide, wrote Primo Levi, is born of a guilt that no punishment has attenuated. This society now loads the bulk of its unresolved guilt on to the shoulders of young men. Guilt is born of shame, which in turn is born of denigration. Manhood is now perhaps the most denigrated condition in our societies.
Men as a collective are demonised and condemned and nothing is said or done to reassure the innocent. Even the guilty can offload some of their individual guilt on their gender as a whole. The total weight of the guilt comes back to bear on the weakest and most sensitive individuals.
On the brink of manhood, a boy must understand that he has before him a lifetime of apologising for his existence, for his strength, for his intelligence, for his love of reason, for his lack of a womb.
In the public discourse, men are shamed at every turn: in movies, television dramas, sitcoms and adverts, in newspaper articles, in a political debate bending over backwards to appease an unappeasable women's lobby. That these crimes against men are frequently committed by individuals themselves passing as men does little to mitigate their effects.
Every holocaust has its collaborators.