Two Monday mornings in a row I've walked into the office to be told of a suicide. Two young women, both young mothers, both with issues around drug and alcohol. Both leaving behind young children.
And I find myself do angry. Angry at the way motherhood is so undervalued that young women like these find themselves feeling so crap. Angry at the excessive greed of the corporate drug-runners making their fat profits, the huge marketing budgets. They make their money and the people who cannot cope wind up broken.
When you say you are angry at the corporate drug-runners, I am not sure if you mean people who push pills that others get addicted to, or people who push pills that are supposed to work in place of human-to-human helping relationships. Either way. Too many pills, too little help. And someone pays the price.
ReplyDeleteBoth. And the Alcohol Industry. Because Alcohol is a legal drug also. And the most entrenched in our societies. People who cannot control their alcohol intake are vilified as though this lack of control is a character flaw when, in fact, it is all about the addictive qualities of the drug. We see CEOs of Alcohol Corporates knighted, while their customers lives are left in ruins.
DeleteForgive me. I spent much of yesterday in tears and in shock.
SORRY ABOUT THE DELETION IRI...BLOODY TYPOS I HATE THEM, HOPE I HAVEN'T MISSED TOO MANY IN THIS TAKE 2 VERSION!
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear of these deaths and I understand your sadness and shock Iri.
Suicide amongst young women is also increasing in the UK, a near neighbour just 40 hanged herself last summer, the head teacher of a primary school in a village a few miles away hanged herself at the school at the end of last year, she was 42.... and there are many other instances of both woman and statistically many more men taking their own lives, unable to carry on any longer for whatever reason. It is indeed truly tragic.
Despite the massive attack on welfare in the UK I continue to work in this area and have recently returned to frontline emergency mental health services on a mixed urban and rural patch where I used to work around adecade ago.
I had previously spent more than 3 years attempting to maintain existing services with ever decreasing resources by negotiating reduced profits in the the private social care sector on a case by case basis....but now I have returned to the 'coalface' as it were, which is where I prefer to be anyway.
I can identify with all you say on this subject Iri, we are living through a holocaust by suicide, a sort of do-it-youself eugenics programme while the resources are increasingly sucked up by the gangster elite and stashed away in tax havens while the safety net is dismantled and sold off. The answers are of course mostly political, but it has to be a new politics that also has to be nurtured and grown from the ground up and of course it takes time to do that
There are no utopias on the agenda because no political arrangement will save everyone from destruction, but we can do things to stem the tide of despair that sweeps the English speaking world and I think many other places as well.
Suicide is definitely on the increase here in Canterbury recently. It was reported that the suicide had lessened immediately after those major earthquakes but now after 3 years of continuous stress on the people here, the rate is rising once again. When we drive into Christchurch we can so feel the tension; just getting about is made so difficult with the constant roadworks as they repair the roads and infrastructure. A necessary evil but round and round you go trying to find a way to where you actually want to go rather than where you are being directed. And people are still living in cold and broken houses, people are still battling EQC and their insurance companies, the effects on family relationships are stress, stress and more stress, and then there is Hekia Parata (Education Minister) wanting to close half the kids schools which for some kids has been their only constancy in a very shaky world on so many levels.
DeleteAll that of course is particular to here, what happened in the cases in my blog were of more general origin of course, all about drugs and loss and children. And I agree with you completely, the less opportunities people have, the more that is sucked out of their lives by the greed of the rich, the higher the suicide rate, or even the attempts at suicide become.
I know about drugs and loss and children.
DeleteThe father of two of my grandchildren is a long term habitual drug abuser. My daughter lost any hope of a normal family life years ago, my grandchildren lost any hope of having a father in their life,and the man him self.............he's just lost in every sense of the word. And worse than that; the children are so damaged by the fathers adiction I can't imagine how they will have healthy relationships in the future. I already I fear for my grandchildrens unborn children. Its a sad and crazy world we live in, I'm angry with the man, he is responsible for his own actions and the consiquences of thsoe actions, but I'm also angry with a society that values children so little it does nothing to repair, limit or prevent the damage.
yes, I know about drugs, loss and children..........I wish I didn't.