A frequent contributor to these columns, Canguro, a couple of hours ago posted the following, which he was moved to by my essay below on male suicide. It’s an astonishing piece of writing and I felt I should emphasise it, and cheer him up a little perhaps, by running it here. When he eventually reaches Australia, if he does, I would like to have a drink with him, and hear some more of his biography. Here it is anyway, unedited.
…. Poignant essay, Bob. And I’m on the verge of returning to Australia after 7 years in Asia, the latest chapter of my life deliberately chosen as an escape from the madness brought on in the aftermath of a failed marriage, loss of contact with children, redundancy, slippage into dependency on the bottle, attenuation of friendships, and several attempts at suicide, some theatrical, some deadly serious, all brought on by the incessant and remorseless indwelling and self-flagellation and depression and unwillingness to unhinge my mental universe from its preoccupation with these historical events.
And my brother also, an early onset sufferer of Parkinson’s disease, who watched as his life fell apart, his business ruined, his second marriage failed when his stoic wife reached the end of her tether and his medication changes wrought psychosis on top of his physical ailments, who then found himself involuntarily committed to the psych ward of a NSW regional hospital and then farmed out to community housing where in his utter aloneness stepped off a chair with a rope around his neck, to end on the floor weeping with existential bewilderment after the hanging attachment broke.
And my father’s cousin, who shot himself on the first anniversary of his only child’s death at the age of 8, hit by a car travelling at highway speed, and both of them found by their mother and wife, who has lived 50 more years with the imprinted memories of these tragic deaths of the man & boy in her life. She could have gone mad, should have, but didn’t, and instead married my father after the early death of my mother, and spent the next 30 years caring for him, a survivor of the Burma railroad, a prisoner attached to the Konya camp, where the men slaved infamously on Hellfire Pass. Tragedy touches us all, in various ways.
Thanks for raising this topic, and now I’m weeping, alone, in China, and about to return to Australia to face my demons, again.
Name:
‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there”
G M Hopkins
Absolutely beautiful F.I.
Bob, you’re a good man to esteem this extraordinary post.
Everything came together so well – word, thought and feeling.
Wow! Astonishing is the word. Very moving. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for featuring Canguro’s moving contribution, and for your previous post on male suicide. I am in tears.
On a similar theme, see Glenn Mitchell’s article at the Drum :
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3916956.html
May I refer you to Ben Pobjie’s website :
http://benpobjie.blogspot.com.au/
which has as its latest entry “cutting”. Mostly he plays for laughs, but this one is deadly serious.
Years ago, in lieu of pursuit of dreams unrealised and lacking the necessary drive to chip away at the necessary hurdles standing between circumstances and goals unattained, I took a job as a trainee psychiatric nurse in one of the public asylums that still existed before the madness of the economic rationalists convinced the public service that such places could be closed and dollars saved and lost souls managed effectively within community settings.
And thus began an education of sorts, wherein a window opened through which one could step and experience another reality, such as it were, where the lost, tortured, mad, bad, seriously demented and otherwise tragically misfitted were gathered wantonly or unwittingly.
Patients who had attempted suicide were common, a dime a dozen, often rejected by family and peers as being seriously unstable and incapable of maintaining a a ‘normal’ relationship, teenaged girls with multiple scarified forearms, stomach-pumped OD’ers, fatalistic users of dangerous drugs, along with psychopaths and arsonists and murderers and the other fringe-dwellers living at the edges of the social bell-curve. And a psychiatrist who wore a t-shirt which proudly proclaimed ‘Mind Fucker’.
And amongst my peers was a colleague whom we all admired, a young man with what The Cat referred to as ‘elan vital’ just bursting out of him, energetic, joyous, smart and funny, seemingly in love with the uniqueness of existing within a human frame, and married to a beautiful wife… who began an affair, and then left him.
Within weeks, this young man, a a black-belt martial artist and musician, with his naturally attractive personality, and liked and admired by all who knew him, had a polar shift from positive to the other extreme, and taking advantage of his knowledge of psychiatric medications had himself prescribed a major anti-depressant (now descheduled), and fatal if overdosed. He would have known that. We found him unconscious in the male toilet of the hospital’s teaching rooms, and were unable, at the time, to understand why such a promising young man should have chosen to end the pain as he did.
You see, as nurses we were used to working day in & day out with the so-called loonies & nutcases, the schizophrenics and manic-depressives and obsessive-compulsives and the relentlessly neurotics, and within that framework one could rationalise that suicidal was appropriate, god, even worthwhile, after all, anything must be better than being crazy, right? But for a young man of 24 with the world at his feet, it just didn’t seem quite right. To knock yourself off just because your wife left you? Hell, there’s plenty more fish in the ocean, right? Hah! Try telling a drowning man that all he needs to do is flail a little harder, when all he’s experiencing in the moment is such fear, and pain, and tiredness, fuck it, I’m flailing away here and still sinking…
It’s a complex subject, and Bob’s done us a unique service by raising the topic. Australia of course is not unique in the phenomenon of male suicide, or in general, though he’s right to assert that men outnumber women and this is a serious concern, socially, societally.
This problem raises many questions, not the least of which is what sort of circumstances or conditions constitute ideality in the sense of setting foundations within a person’s life, such that they are psychologically robust enough to withstand the rigours of a fully-lived life with all its tests of courage and endurance.
I wonder, for example, whether our ancestors killed themselves at such a rate. Did the aborigines have a history of self-inflicted death, eskimos, amero-indians or other indigenous peoples?
What is it about language and our relationship to it that permits us to self-evaluate and then take that awful final step. It’s said, for instance, that prior to the acquisition of language skills, that we live in some sort of utopian ideal, and that we’re kind of a whole being and at one with ourselves and in the moment, so to speak, but that after we develop these higher intellectual behaviours and skills with the concomitant development of the Freudian I-ego, that there’s a kind of split from reality. I believe that. And I believe that we are fooled, gulled and hypnotised into some alternate reality by the incessant snarking of the little man in the brain, the shadow player who says “I” to everything, the ghost in the machine. Just my two bob’s worth…
Thanks again Canguro. A frightening statistic is the suicide rate amongst physicians, and in particular psychiatrists.
“A more unexpected finding concerning physician suicides is that there’s no difference in the rates between male and female doctors. This is surprising because in the general population, men commit suicide at much higher rates than women. For example, in the United States, men commit suicide at nearly 4 times the rate of women, but women constitute about half of all physician suicides.”
see :
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissus-in-all-us/200908/the-occupation-the-highest-suicide-rate
Also see :
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=daring-to-die
a summary :
” * Every year millions of people around the world try to kill themselves—and nearly one million of them succeed. Suicide is the 11th biggest killer of Americans and the third-leading killer of 15- to 24-year-olds.
* A motivation to die, often fueled by mental illness, is only part of the problem. To intentionally end their own life, people need the will to carry out their plans. This resolve depends on factors such as fearlessness and being able to tolerate pain and to act impulsively.
* The latest research shows that fearlessness can be conditioned: people who gain experience with pain, whether from abuse by others or by their own hands, gradually improve their ability to tolerate discomfort; they also get used to the idea of harming themselves.
* Poor impulse control, sometimes fueled by alcohol or other substances, may spur suicidal acts.”
What’s going on?? The place is deserted.
Canguro – what a great name that is. Kangaroo?
You’re right about “such places …closed”.
A wise-old-doctor saying: “Don’t delve too deeply”.
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Something disturbing – now, when I enter this hallowed hall, a picture of Bob Ellis (much younger) appears at the right of the screen; wearing a hypnotist-type of expression, forcing me to look away quickly. I’m hoping it’s not just my Apple.
Very uneasy.
Unsettling
Maybe they’re all still sleeping off the hangover after the Qld bloodbath, and the wake.
My guess is that I gave them too much reading matter, especially heavy stuff.
There’s more to come.
Re: the tiny tome (or is that a contradiction thing)
Booktopia said no
But Amazon said yes.
macabre,
I dare not go there
Deserted, yes. Gone to other blogspots, perhaps. Rapping about death isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. And it’s late on the east coast. Your Apple’s ghosting the virtual presence of our blog-host? Weird, but then, this is 2012, the year of strange…
Canguro, Spanish for kangaroo, (or baby-sitter, or baby sister). It’s a nickname given me by a Colombiana I knew, la chica caliente, who was on the verge of being turfed out of the country and for reasons difficulty fathomable I sponsored to enable her permanent residence in Oz. Complex & crazy story, not the right time to tell it here. I like the nickname though…
“rapping about death” – that’s good!
Nicknames are cheerful, aren’t they