This article was published in The Northern Web, November 2006 edition, a community magazine produced by the students of Para West Adult Campus. Copyright of this article is held by the Department of Education and Children's Services, South Australia Government. This magazine is produced as free community information and
is not for sale, consequently there is no profit to be made from it. I am the original author of the article. I have permission to reproduce this article on condition that it remains free to the public and no one makes a profit from it being published elsewhere. There is currently no on-line publication of this article except for here, so I can't not provide any links or electronic evidence of anything. However, if required I will be able to provide hardcopy evidence of all this.
Now, some might think that this isn't directly related to parenting, or to Minti, but it is. Recently there has been a lot of talk here about mental illness, self-harming, and suicide. There's been a lot of talk about communicating with our children about these topics. And, sadly, there has been a bit of talk about whether or not Minti is the right place to download our troubles and woes, with the concern being that having these often tragic stories on Minti may be upsetting others, and spoiling the otherwise bright and cheerful mood of the site. I have copied this article here as I believe that it addresses these issues as an overall summary...
In the early hours of the morning, I received the phone call. The voice on the other end of the line was barely controlled, but that was quite understandable, considering the news that it conveyed. A friend of mine, whom I hadn't heard from for a couple of months, had committed suicide. Although this information upset me, I wasn't really surprised: my friend has suffered from mental illness for most of her life, and constantly battled with alcoholism and drug dependancy. She had harmed herself many times in the past. many people might look as such people as "losers", but my friend was far from that.
Despite her own problems, my friend had devoted her entire adult life to educating young people about the dangers of drugs, and promoting awareness of mental illness within her community. On this one particularly bad day, because of her own mental illness, she tried to stop the pain and, this time, went too far. No one she had spoken to that day had taken her seriously, and now there is one less person in the world trying to make it a better place.
My friend wasn't the only person to take her own life that day: she was simply, for me, the human face of a frightening set of statistics. At some point in their lives, one in five people will suffer from a mental illness, even though many of these remain undiagnosed and untreated. Every day, an average of five people in Australia commit suicide. Imagine the world-wide statistics! Many people, especially young people, are auto-masochistic (self-harming).
Many people suffer from mental, emotional, and relationship problems. These things are largely hidden from the community at large, because society has designated them as taboo, thus isolating the victims of such things as domestic violence, stress, alcoholism and mental illness. In fact, ir is this very isolation which may perpetuate or aggrovate the problems. Conversely, there are simple things that all of us can do in order to help others in our immediate community. You don't need a degree in psychology or psychiatry in order to listen to someone in distress and say three little magic words, "I BELIEVE YOU."
Sure, we all have problems of our own, and we have enough trouble dealing with our own lives, without having everyone else's problems to deal with as well. But we don't have to fix everyone else's problems: no-one could rightly expect anyone else to perform such miracles. It's up to us to deal with our own problems, and it's up to everyone else to deal with theirs - with the support of professionals who are available to help. But it isn't going to hurt us to listen to people, let others confide in us, and believe that they mean what they say. If you try it, you may be surprised how many other people are willing to listen to you and take you seriously when your life is in turmoil.
Next time you ask someone, "How are you?" pay attention to the answer. By doing so, you may save a life.
