Clare Samaritans’ head questions figures

The director of the Samaritans in Clare, Gerry Dobbin, who is stepping down at the end of this month following a three-year term, believes that the national suicide rate is higher than official figures suggest.

 

The issue of suicide made national headlines yet again last week following the death of Minister of State, Shane McEntee. At the politician’s funeral in Meath, his brother, Gerry deplored anonymous attacks made on him following the recent Budget. He strongly hit out at what he called “the faceless people” who sent anonymous texts and posted criticism on websites. Mr McEntee’s death, is the latest in a series of recent deaths that have been related to cyber-bullying.

Meanwhile, national figures published last week show that a total of 412,167 calls were received by Samaritans Ireland over the past 12 months, an increase of three percent on the same period last year. Excluding calls that lasted less than 10 seconds, the number of contacts between callers and Samaritans’ volunteers was 258,245.

“I have to be careful but there’s no doubt but that people do take their lives, where there is no proven intent,” Gerry Dobbin commented in relation to national suicide rates.

“Unless there’s proven intent, there is under-recording. I don’t say that as a criticism. Sometimes this happens with the best possible intent of protecting families. But there’s no doubt that suicides are being under-recorded. We have an average of about 500 per year and I think that there are certainly more,” he stated.

Noting that 528 people were recorded as taking their own lives in 2011, Mr Dobbin said research led by John Connolly, secretary of the Irish Society of Suicidology, supported this belief.

“For example they were looking at sole occupant, late night fatal crashes involving young men. They have a belief that a certain number of those accidents were, in fact, suicide. That’s published research. That’s not just my own belief but I’d certainly go along with that,” Mr Dobbin added.

While talk about suicide was not a regular occurrence in his day, Mr Dobbin doesn’t discount the suggestion that perhaps suicide is talked about too often these days, thereby perhaps glamorising it?

“That’s a very relevant question. Sometimes people say that people taking their own lives has nearly become a lifestyle option? I’m not sure about that. We ask the suicide question of every caller. Doing that doesn’t implant the idea in their head but if they’re not suicidal it doesn’t bother them. If they are suicidal it opens the door for them to talk about what is going on for them in a real way. It’s about the realness of what’s going on for them in their lives,” he believes.

“No one approach is going to solve this problem. It has to be a multi-faceted approach. It has to include different agencies and it has to be a social response from within the community,” Mr Dobbin says of problems that individuals may be experiencing.

“Speaking at the launch of the annual Samaritans’ report, national chairperson Pio Fenton said there had been a marked increase in calls relating to the ongoing economic recession this year.

“Money is an issue that seems to be causing more and more difficulty and the nature of calls we receive reflects that,” he said.

“This year we have seen the strongest evidence yet that the recession is affecting the emotional health landscape of the country. Approximately one in six calls we received in 2012 were recession-related. This is a dramatic increase on 2011, when only one-in-10 calls was linked to the recession. There has been a real hardening of despair amongst many of those who contact us; people are struggling to cope in the face of uncertainty around employment, personal debt and other financial concerns,” Mr Fenton said.