Suicide

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, on having introduced this debate in such an effective fashion. Suicide is an extremely complex form of action to study and, hence, to develop preventive strategies against. There are two reasons for that. The first is that, by definition, you cannot interview people who have committed suicide—there are very few other examples in social life where this is true. Secondly, in order to be said to commit suicide, you have to have the intention to die. If you step off a kerb accidentally and a car knocks you down, it is not suicide. As most people do not leave notes, intention has to be inferred retrospectively by coroners.

When I studied suicide in the early part of my academic career, we looked at lots of judgments made by coroners. They led me to be deeply suspicious of suicide statistics and therefore of preventive strategies based on those statistics. It is not that suicide statistics are just inaccurate around the edges; in my opinion, they are often probably totally wrong and non-comparable. One thing about the government document on preventing suicide in England is that it is based almost wholly on statistics, and risk is calculated in that way. For example, the noble Baroness cited figures suggesting that three times as many young men commit suicide as other groups. However, I think that that is highly unlikely to be true. I do not have the time to say why, but I think that it is highly unlikely. One must depend upon intensive studies of suicide and not just statistical ones.

One way of studying who has committed suicide is to look at those who attempt suicide in various serious situations. We had an interesting study of people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. If someone jumps off that bridge he is almost certain to die—only about 3% survive. The study interviewed the survivors. It was interesting that on the way down, people were thinking, “I didn’t need to do this”, or, “I could have solved my problems”. What they said was very interesting. It was admittedly a small sample, because most people die, but they all said that it was the Golden Gate or nothing. In other words, the method that you use to commit suicide is very important, especially if you intend to do it seriously—there is a massive difference between most attempted and actual suicides.

Another study of the Golden Gate Bridge covered 515 people who were stopped from jumping. That was also interesting. One might imagine that people who really want to kill themselves will go on until they do it, but that is not so at all. In the study, of the 515 people, 95% were either still alive 25 years later or had died of natural causes. In other words, at least for certain types of suicide, if prevented at source, it does not recur. That has important implications.

In this country, some 20 people on average jump off Beachy Head each year—124 people died there between 1965 and 1979. A medical researcher who studied the details very intensively—this is why I am recommending intensive studies—concluded that 115 of this group were almost certainly suicides. To show the point that I was making earlier, only 58 were recorded as suicides by the coroner. That is a huge difference; it is double the rate. A lot of people who jump off Beachy Head are women, not men. Having read Preventing Suicide in England, a bit more lateral thinking would be in order, in recognising all the great work that the Samaritans do.

In my minute I must ask quickly, first, what is the Government’s policy on popular suicide spots? Are they all left to volunteer groups, such as at Beachy Head, where it is mainly a chaplaincy group that tries to stop people? It is very important to know because probably about 500 people a year die in popular suicide spots, which is about 4% of the total number in the country. That is pretty significant. I do not know whether the Government have a policy on that, but as the Golden Gate study shows, if you stop them, the vast majority do not come back to try again. Secondly, is there an analogue to the Live Through This project in the United States, which is pretty intriguing to me. It is backed by the American Association of Suicidology. Oh dear, I will have to stop, I suppose. It is transformational because it is a website for people who have survived serious suicide attempts. They speak out openly in a variety of media sources and communities. The idea is to strip away stigma and shame, and it is the first time that that has ever been done. There is a major input from people on a large scale who have attempted suicide, and there is a public-private partnership to support it. The main thing is that people who have attempted suicide have been seen as objects not subjects. In this case, they appear as subjects. I had a good third point but have no time to make it.