Many of the news reports about Alexander McQueen’s death from suicide have focused on the fact that he killed himself because of his inconsolable grief over losing his mother days earlier, and his mentor, Isabella Blow, 3 years ago.
As sad as this was to read, somehow the link between the two events didn’t feel right. Suddenly I thought of my own mother who is alive and well. What did this mean? That when the inevitable times comes of losing her, not only will I have my grief to deal with, but I might also have to resist killing myself?
One article I read in The Guardian challenged this view.
Carole Cadwalladr says that to say that grief causes someone to commit suicide is just plain dangerous. What’s less well reported is the fact that undiagnosed depression can lead to suicide. What’s also fact is that suicides tend to occur in clusters. This was the most disturbing part about this article.
“A study in 1974 found that a front-page story about suicide precipitated 58 “additional” deaths. In 2002, Professor Keith Hawton, head of the Oxford Centre for Suicide Research, described the evidence as “overwhelming.
At least 1.5 million people will face a major bereavement in 2010. That’s nearly 30,000 people this week alone, who, like McQueen, will be grieving and vulnerable; who may be depressed. Telling them that this boy wonder, this shining star, whose memory has been burnished by his early death, for whom celebrities have mourned and the Sky news chopper was scrambled, killed himself because his mother died a week ago is grossly irresponsible.”
This is a complex story, with a complex history binding it together. It’s going to take a more sensitive and intuitive response than the one we have seen in the press recently before we begin to fully understand the impulse behind suicide.
The writer A. Alvarez, who wrote the classic book about Suicide called The Savage God says, “suicide means different things for different people at different times.” There are no glib, easy explanations, and part of the difficulty of dealing with suicide is that the one person who can explain it is dead. They have had the last word.
