The mystery of Ireland’s youth suicides

Ireland has the second-highest youth suicide rate in the world. The experts are scratching their heads about what to do.

Among the nations that make up the archipelago of Great Britain and Ireland the suicide rate in Scotland is highest at 15.7 deaths per 100,000. The Republic of Ireland comes second at 12.5. Wales is 12 and England is 9.9. The Republic, on the other hand, has the second highest level of youth suicide in the world. New Zealand has the highest. People in Ireland are beginning to scratch their heads and ask, “Why?”

A recent conference in Belfast addressed the issue of suicide prevention. What seemed to emerge was a range of rather confused signals. Maintain the stigma said one American speaker. Don’t talk about “committing suicide”, it’s hurtful to the bereaved, said another – which seemed to be going in the opposite direction.

A few days earlier an article on youth suicide in The Irish Times by a college chaplain, David Keating, wondered why all the study and suicidology which was going on worldwide did not seem to be helping any country solve the problem. “By focussing too much on systematic approaches to suicide prevention, we have neglected or forgotten something profoundly fundamental – the power of humans to keep each other alive”, he wrote.

For him the balance between stigma and celebrity seemed to pose a problem which had to be addressed. “Scarcely 30 years ago in Ireland, a suicide funeral was a quiet and guilt-ridden affair with distraught relatives left to grieve alone and in shame. Today a suicide funeral is large and well-attended, with huge outpourings of grief, emotion and tactile affection. Kind and memorable sentiments, unspoken before death, are now generously spoken and shared by mourners of all ages who, bound together by tragedy, will ensure the deceased will be remembered.

“Among the mourners, a solitary life looks on. Perhaps feeling insignificant or rarely noticed, maybe with no real prospect of achievement or just tired of picking up the pieces of broken relationships, this troubled mind wonders what’s the point of it all and ‘since my life isn’t really going anywhere at least my death would be noticed.’” The agenda is thus set for the “copycat” suicide.

But some strategies do work. David Litts, addressing the Belfast conference, described how suicide levels in the US Air Force in the 1990s made a 40% jump to a level of 15 per 100,000. However, with a series of measures – challenging the “macho culture”, organising better family and community support, chaplaincy services – they succeeded in bringing the incidence down 3.7 per 100,000.

The focus on chaplaincy services raises the issue of religion in the context of suicide. The Belfast conference was also told of the very significant difference between suicide rates in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic – 8.5 in the North. This was surprising. For many years a great deal of attention has been paid to concerns about psychological trauma, anxiety and depression in Northern Ireland in the context of the sectarian and general conflict there. However, the factor of religion may well have played a crucial role in keeping the rate of suicide low. Serious religious commitment – across the denominations is probably deeper in Northern Ireland than it is in the South where religious practice is in decline, particularly among young males.

A recent study reported by Dr Ciaran Clarke and others in an international psychiatry journal raised the question of the relationship between the “religiosity” of a society and the suicide rate.

There were 439 suicides in the Irish Republic in 1999: 295 rural and 144 urban; 349 male and 90 female. In rural areas male suicides were approximately four times higher than female suicides, whereas in urban areas they were twice as high.

They noted that “It has been suggested since the 19th century that at the community level a decline in religious observance and belief is associated with an increased incidence of suicide. Temporal trends seem to support such a link, and the complexities of the association are being unravelled. There is evidence, for example, that not only individual religious beliefs, but (in the case of men) the extent to which attitudes are held by others, may modify the risk of suicide: men are less likely to commit suicide in a religious society regardless of their own attitudes towards religion.”

They suggest that “religious belief and practice might diminish suicide risk by providing social support or by making the practice of suicide morally repugnant. Furthermore they say that “there is evidence that the protective effect of religiosity is mediated by the intolerance for suicidal behaviour which it engenders.”

In their study Clarke and his colleagues cite the results of a 1999 population-based survey of religious beliefs and practice among 1,395 people divided according to age, gender, and urban-rural location and compare it with rates of suicide. This shows that in the general Irish population “religiosity” – which seems to include everything from devout practice to fairly non-specific belief in God – is greater among females than males. Given the six-fold difference in suicide rates in Ireland between males and females, their overall conclusion – couched in rigorous academic terms - is that these differing degrees of religiosity among males and females may contribute to the disparity in their suicide rates. “Since the gender difference in suicides is the most salient feature of Irish suicide demographics, varying religiosity between males and females may be significant.”

It would seem that pastoral care within the various denominations – whether it be within the family, schools or by ministers of religion – can play an important role in reducing the incidence of these tragedies. A delicate but vital balance has to be kept between the need to console the bereaved and maintaining an awareness of the proscriptions attached to suicide and of the doctrines related to the promises of eternal life. If the proscriptions and the promised eternal rewards are lost sight of the stigma is undermined and, as David Litts warned, suicide can become “an almost socially acceptable occurance” -- or even an acceptable solution to “a life which doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere.”

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer in Dublin.