On this World Suicide Prevention Day keep in mind that hope without investment is little more than a fairy story
“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.” My dad would trot out this line every time I wanted to dip into my children’s savings account for something idiotic like a plasma lamp or a yin-yang toe ring. His mam used to say it to him too. It’s the sort of folksy homily that through family transmission you one day find yourself using.
After his suicide in August 2020 I was rifling through dad’s things and rattling around in the same case that contained his birth certificate I found a small piece of plastic tat. I emptied it into my hand: it was a figure of a mariner, classically outfitted in a beard and oilskins and smoking a pipe, which I had picked up, improbably, at a ‘ten items for 10p!!’ table in the last adrenaline gasps of a Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale sometime in the mid-1990s. I got it for dad partly to score a point about my fiscal prudence, and partly because I had a dawning understanding of his peculiar interest in ‘the sea.’ His own father and grandfather had been merchant seamen out of the port of Grimsby and we’d grown up on the crook of the Humber estuary in nearby Cleethorpes. I couldn’t believe he had kept it all these years.
As a kid I always mistook Dad’s frugality for miserliness but beneath the surface of the water I didn’t see how fast his feet were peddling. For decades he did all the overtime he could get, always in service of a better future for me and my brother. At his funeral people lined up to tell me about his other kindnesses: the time he had patched up a neighbour’s fence after a storm blew it over, the time he switched bikes with a co-worker when she got a flat tyre and rode it home for her. He never missed a blood donor appointment. Such generosity in action was, to him, instinctual. Days before he died, when the intention was surely germinating in his mind, he visited a friend in hospital to take her some sweets. Even at a time of great personal anguish he had room in his heart and mind for others. In the mosaic of what makes up a person, any material generosity for which economic circumstances might allow doesn’t add up to all that much next to the stuff that matters: the discrete acts of goodness that people remember.
The theme of this year’s World Suicide Prevention Day is ‘creating hope through action.’ Since dad died when I think about hope I get angry. Because hope doesn’t mean what it used to, or maybe it doesn’t mean what I thought it did. I can live today knowing of the slings and arrows that might be waiting for me tomorrow. I know more people I love will one day die: hope doesn’t mean blind optimism for a ceaselessly sunlit future. But I feel like invoking hope asks for a certain sporting fairness. For hope to mean anything at all its horse has to occasionally come in.
After his trawlerman father was lost at sea, Dad left school aged fourteen. He needed to help bring in some more of those pennies to his widowed mam and her four young kids. There wasn’t time for grief, even if the 1970s had had anything to offer by way of childhood bereavement support. Instead the unprocessed ache was left to sink deep into the bones. Later it would periodically burst out like psychotrauma morgellons and eventually knit itself into a cloak of heavy depression. And through it all he worked and saved and worked and saved.
In the intervening years public health in the UK underwent a series of almost imperceptible nudges away from the collective and towards the individual. ‘Wellness’ has become a responsibility of the self, a personal virtue rather than something we might expect in return for our participation in society. At the same time the combined offensive of chronic underfunding, service outsourcing, trusts hobbled by PFI contracts, a collapse in nursing education grants, a 30% reduction in mental health beds since 2009, as well as the more recent stupefying excesses of the Test and Trace implementation and the profiteer mardi gras that was Covid contract tendering, has skeletonised our National Health Service in a generation. When dad needed to cash in on his social dividend, when he experienced peaks in the major depressive disorder that would distort his reason into episodes of psychosis and suicidal ideation, all that was left was a mirage.
How is a vulnerable person supposed to hold any hope in a system that tells them they are too unwell for any of the therapeutics available to their GP practice but not yet at the crisis of immiseration, disturbance or self-mutilation needed to secure emergency intervention? And how could the ten-minute telephone consultation that dad had with his doctor on the day he died possibly have determined that with any certainty?
Hope doesn’t bestow educational opportunities on areas of deprivation, hope doesn’t legislate for job security, hope doesn’t protect against wage stagnation, hope doesn’t grant the universal right to safe and warm housing, hope doesn’t magic up social cohesion.
When hope is made an internal resource of the individual it can create an overwhelming pressure on that person to be hopeful, further stigmatising them when they inevitably fail. Service gaps push monitoring of the suicidal onto families who are out of their depth, and when the worst happens they blame themselves. Current health policy seems to hold that if a person’s odds on ‘getting better’ are middling to low, why should we bother throwing good money after bad? When such a business mindset is much the same in the only viable electoral alternative it is hard not to feel hopeless for the future of this potemkin NHS that at any time could blow over in a stiff wind.
Dad took his life weeks before his retirement. Knowing him I am in no doubt that this was timed so that his family would receive his death-in-service benefit. He took care of the pennies in the belief that the pounds would take care of themselves. He paid into national insurance for fifty years in good conscience and at the end of it he saw the best chance of a hopeful future was one that didn’t feature him.
I’ve spent the past year and a half writing a book about folklore and mourning rituals around death and suicide as a way to navigate the disorientaion of what is a particularly bewildering and often furious type of grief. It started as an escapist impulse, an indulgence of my morbid inclinations. It struck me fairly belatedly why I was drawn to these tales: folk stories are a product of ordinary people interpreting the realities of their own lives. Often these lives are full of hardships. Some hardships are due to the caprice of nature, but others are plainly the result of structural inequality. Inspiring legends, cautionary tales, kindred wisdom and folk medicine have been how people make do when the powers that govern them do not appear to care. Angela Carter said that the spirit of fairy tales is ‘heroic optimism.’ For them to be passed down presupposes someone to pass it down to: folklore is all about hope.
But I suspect I was drawn to them foremost because they usually have the satisfying ending that dad was denied. There is nothing more he could have done to ‘help himself.’ There is nothing more I could have done, though it has taken me two years to make myself mostly believe that. Access to healthcare is a moral imperative, not a deus ex machina for which to sit around and wait. There are hashtags, awareness campaigns, an increasing comprehension of trauma and complex psychiatric disorders, and the beginning of a reckoning of how we talk about these topics between ourselves. Dad was right on that, the pennies are important and they add up to a lot. But there is a gulf of difference between pennies and pounds, and without immediate and radical investment hope might as well be a fairy story.
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This essay was written for the National Suicide Prevention Alliance’s lived experience campaign for World Suicide Prevention Day 2022. Click here to read the other contributions on the theme of ‘hope in action.’
Resources:
National Suicide Prevention Alliance: https://nspa.org.uk/
Campaign Against Living Miserably: https://www.thecalmzone.net/
Rethink: https://www.rethink.org/
Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide: https://uksobs.org/
