Prof. Diana Winstanley suicide - appeal for info

by Michelle Clarke - Social Justice and Ethics Tue Aug 28, 2007 21:12

Sal Fiore

Re. Professor Winstanley - research into bullying, stress, discrimination.

Death by suicide.

Yes, I would be delighted to make contact with you (on one provisio and that is due to ABI, Bipolar, anxiety, Chronic Fatigue since 1993) my hours are limited and my concentration for using the phone is a real problem.

Over the last number of years, I have written quite a few articles on suicide, some are personal reflections and conflict of living and continuing to do so post injury.

Illness involves a change of person, a change of attitudes of family, of husband, friends .......you are adrift to cope with the inherent bullying, stress and discrimination albeit highly subjective.

You find your dischevelled self adrift in a foreign country, in a psychiatric hospital, and trying everything to keep the husband you had for 15 years, begging him in a way that you never do in your altenate person but yet desperate to be pre-accident and well, not on an unknown journey into the abyss.

The reality is your husband is young and sees you as you have become - something that it takes you years to know as you embrace a dissociative state, numbed, marked, half deaf, half blind, no smell, no short term memory.......The journey is a struggle.

His affair, the divorce, the hospital, the ECT, then the Annulment - you feel unable and out of control - the reality is 'you are'. However, you still remain part of the wellness system and the divorce court, the game the legal system embraces, if you have some money but your momentum is increasing and your heading for that illness that has existed for three hundred years now, but it is part of the secrety society because it applies to a few - me being one and all you can do is live one day at a time because you never know when pure exhaustion wipes you our......

This creates the paradox - why not the suicide, why the struggle to continue.......particularly when one would have been suicidal at times befor 1993.

This is an area well worth researching but not as what appears to be policy now - in a very definitive way.......The brain is an extraordinary instrument and so much is to be found out particularly regarding stress, bullying and discrimination.

In the 1970's a Dr. Kelleher started to review the impact of Suicide in Holy Catholic Ireland. He looked towards the stigma and shame. He reviewed the impact of bodies of people who committed suicide and their burial outside the grave yard........harsh but that was Church Belief, no doubt fear was

Suicide was illegal until the 1980's - the shame is harder to shift. Presently in Ireland there is an outflow related to increased numbers of young people who choose this route. There are so many organisations with their view as to how best to deal with the problem. There is fundraising, there are websites.....but maybe the journey is more personal.

800 people this weeked (related to Suicide and its worldwide impact) are at a luxury hotel in Kerry - another conference. It might be worth contacting the www.ias.ie site for information.

One more comment I need to make is that the medical profession are challenged by suicidal patients......I mean challenged to intrinisic fear of being human. I ask and will continue to ask, why the medical profession shy away from the suicide of their colleagues......The budget for mental health in Ireland has been cut by half over the last 10 years......Nobody really wants to stand up for us........Dr. Kelleher; Professor McKeon and a few others prove the exception to the rule.

Goodnight.

Michelle Clarke