Who Cares?

Today I found out that one of my friends at school had committed suicide. His name was Tom. Tom was a cherished individual, he was one of the few people who somehow managed to remain friends with everyone at school. When I use the word everyone, it isn’t for exaggerative effect, dinner ladies, teachers, athletes…They all loved him. There was something magnetic about Tom, he was nothing short of a marksman in delivering smiles and laughter to anyone who landed in his crosshairs, deftly distributing joy to anyone fortunate enough to come into his company. Tom is the second person in my school year to have ended his life. The other, Felix, sadly, threw himself from the top of a hotel building after suffering from schizophrenia back in 2018.
Tom is the third person I have known to have taken their own life within the space of three years. The second is my best friend’s sister, Phoebe. Phoebe took her own life, having been isolated at university and unable to receive the support she needed. And the first was Archie, a medic at university, who was found by my ex-girlfriend hanging in his room having lost a battle with depression. These were all young people, well-educated people who had their entire lives ahead of them. People who decided that it wasn’t worth continuing to exist, people who decided that death was easier than prolonged suffering, people who had turned against their most basic instinct of survival. I pass no judgement on these individuals, it only brings me great sadness to imagine the pain they were going through.
Suicide poses lots of problems of analysis, namely that once occurred, the death can never be fully understood. We can attribute the death to mental disorders, we can say to ourselves conciliatory phrases such as, as aforementioned “, they lost a battle to depression”, but it is a vapid vestibule of a phrase offering nothing, and excusing everything. In the case of Phoebe, she tried to get help but it was minimal and wanting, yet the coroner audaciously asserted that “having considered things very carefully, I cannot identify any point where things should have been done differently for Phoebe by anybody involved in her support.” It would appear, then, that the caregivers, Newcastle University, in this instance did everything they could? Suicide would appear to be an inevitability according to this coroner.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for people between 20 and 34 years of age in the UK. It is so prevalent that my housemate, Rory, who lost his mother to alcoholism, expected me to tell him that a friend had killed themself upon hearing the sobs and screams from my room. Is this a reality we are ok with?
This has become, but can not remain a normalised idea. How many more people have to lose their lives before this is addressed appropriately? We are expected to remain calm, to subsume into normalcy, but how? Our government, the omnibenevolent caregivers, who stoke hatred for people arriving from countries that have been pillaged by weapons we’ve sold, care not for such happenings. No. They refuse to pay our actual caregivers satisfactory wages, they defund services, and they demonise working people.
I wonder what will happen to me and other people like me if people we know continue to kill themselves at the rate they have been doing so. In seven years we will have lost seven more people bringing the total to ten. I wonder if it will still take months of waiting to see a psychologist, I wonder how our behaviour will have changed, I wonder what we might do. It would be nice to imagine that our omnibenevolent government is also asking such questions, but I doubt it.