Suicide

Friday

Julius Bourke

It’s time we accepted that depression is a terminal illness

For Robin Williams, depression was a terminal illness. He also, his wife has revealed, suffered from Parkinson’s disease. These two problems are far more connected than most people know: for many sufferers the first signs of Parkinson’s, often ten years or more before the more readily recognized abnormal movements are seen, are those of a depressive illness. Why? Because the abnormal brain chemistry of the two illnesses is essentially the same. But it is a grave mistake to assume that Williams must have killed himself because he couldn’t face the onset of Parkinson’s. He killed himself because he suffered from depression. Suicide is the final symptom of a mental illness.

Ed West Ed West

When did suicide cease to be morally repugnant?

The great Theodore Dalrymple once came up with the theory that there is a fixed level of righteous indignation in any society. As soon as we become more relaxed about one area — say, drug taking — we get much more prudish and finger-wagging about something else — smoking, for example. Sometimes one taboo easily takes the place of a previous one. Race, for example, has become the new sex, with the F-word and C-word de-stigmatised and replaced by the N-word and P-word as no-nos (the new taboo also comes with its own hypocrisies, obviously, and few of today’s moral leaders send their kids to vibrant inner-city schools). But in

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Why I’m against posthumous pardons, even for Alan Turing

Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss performances of his musical play staged earlier this month. Shot at Dawn is about a sister’s quest for a recognition (after his death) of her brother, Harry Briggs, a soldier in the Great War who was executed for desertion. The play is sympathetic to the idea of posthumous pardon; coupled with this, it’s a lament that society punishes people without trying to understand why they do what they did. A second theme emerges: homosexuality, and the difficulty (then) of living with this in a world that does not understand. I

Thursday

Peter Jones

Assisted dying? Ancient religion was all for it

There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the major differences between e.g. Christians and pagans was that Christians were renowned for welcoming, indeed rejoicing at, death. Pagans found this incomprehensible. Not that pagans feared the afterlife. Although, in the absence of sacred texts, there were no received views on the matter, Greeks reckoned that if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate it in this life rather than the next. Initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries were promised a prosperous afterlife, but Diogenes the cynic retorted: ‘Do you mean that Pataikion the thief will enjoy a better

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

The terminal confusion of Dignity in Dying

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Harris and Madeleine Teahan discuss the Assisted Dying Bill” startat=874] Listen [/audioplayer]If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/ It brings on many changes/ And I can take or leave it if I please’. However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it. Suicide, as commonly practised by amateurs, is not painless: it is frequently agonising, complicated, botched and has ample potential to leave one still alive but with a cruel

Friday

Isabel Hardman

There’s cause to worry about our sons as well as our daughters

The graph below shows one of the most unsettling trends I’ve come across. It’s the female and male suicide rates, and while the former has halved since the 1980s, the latter has fallen by just 8 per cent. Men account for 77 per cent of all suicides, and the group now most likely to take their lives are men aged 40-44. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/flzpM/index.html”] These are the starkest statistics in what I argue in this week’s magazine is a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in our country. There are male-specific problems ranging from catastrophic mental health conditions to boys falling behind girls at every stage of their education. Men get ahead in the

Thursday

Simon Baker

Madness and massacre in the jungle

In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject of his 1998 narrative poem, ‘Bill of Rights’. D’Aguiar often examines brutal historical episodes from the perspective of a survivor or escapee. In Feeding the Ghosts (1997), the drowning of 140 slaves in 1798 so that the Liverpool-based owners could claim on the insurance is told through the story of Mintah, the one slave who did not die. In the new novel we have Joyce and her daughter, Trina, Americans who, having fallen for the messianic allure of ‘the preacher’ (a figure based on Jim Jones) and followed him to

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch: the boyhood in suburban St Louis; Harvard and early trips to Europe; the war, Greenwich Village and the Beats; Latin America and exile in 1950s Tangier, Existential Paris, Swinging London; the return to the USA and emergence as a literary celebrity adored by Warhol. The wheels are oiled with

Thursday

Molly Guinness

Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper – review

This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and murder. Françoise Dior decided that her uncle Christian had been killed in a Jewish plot in 1957, so she joined a Nazi movement in France before moving to London to work for the cause over here. Later, she got more interested in the ‘spiritual side of Nazism’, which developed into a fascination with Satan. A sexual relationship with her teenage daughter Christiane eventually turned sour and when Françoise could no longer put up with her, she tricked Christiane into committing suicide. It’s all told in a cheerful, chatty way by

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

The debate over assisted suicide

Looking at today’s report by the Commission on Assisted Dying, the first thing that jumps out is just how comprehensive it is. They reach the conclusion that assisted suicide should be legalised — and they’ve done so after hundreds of hours of consultation with various groups and experts, as well as sifting through the evidence from countries where various forms of assisted dying are allowed. This is no rush job. Among the stand-out points from its 415 pages is that the current situation — under which anyone encouraging or assisting another person’s suicide can be punished by 14 years in prison — is both ‘very distressing for families and unclear

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Lord Falconer has the wrong ideas about assisted suicide

So Lord Falconer’s commission, funded by Sir Terry Pratchett, has concluded that there is a ‘strong case’ for assisted suicide, has it? Well, there’s a thing. Given their previous form and the composition of the committee, it would have been remarkable if they’d decided that, on balance, the law works perfectly well — which is what one of their witnesses, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keith Starmer, said. On the whole, partly because some anti-euthanasia bodies refused to participate and partly because people with a blatant opposition to assisted dying weren’t invited to sit on it, the composition and conclusions of the body reflected the opinions of those who set

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Lifelong death wish

In February 2009, in a review in these pages of Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel, The Post Office Girl, I wrote: ‘Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers “to see.’’  In The Post Office Girl Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.’ Especially the details of loneliness, I should have added. Intimations of suicide darken this novel, and in 1942, with the manuscript incomplete, Zweig, age 60, and his much younger second wife, Lotte, poisoned themselves in a small Brazilian town and died in bed with her embracing him. It is telling that

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blow-out in Berlin

D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). Not only was it brilliant, it was also a first novel, and apparently by an American. Holden Caulfield was invoked, and Liam McIlvanney called it ‘the most vital slice of American vernacular since Huck Finn’. It turned out, though, to have been written by a Brit, ‘on the floor of a box-room in Balham’. D. B. C. Pierre is the nom de plume of Peter Finlay, an evolved childhood nickname — ‘Dirty But Clean’, which is evidently his motto as a writer.

Wednesday

Richard Shone

The optimism of a suicide

A postal strike would have been a disaster for Van Gogh. Letters were his lifeline and consolation. Not only did he receive through the mail his regular allowance from his brother Theo but, in letter after letter in return, he poured out his thoughts and feelings, recorded his work in progress and conveyed his impressions of books, people and places. In his often solitary existence, he was an avid recipient and kept in touch with a variety of correspondents, especially when he was in the South of France during the last two years of his life. The glory must be shared, however, with Theo, in that he kept Vincent’s letters,