The right place for a horse’s head
Martin Doyle
EVEN after 40 years, I still remember one truly revolting moment at the movies.
It happens in The Godfather. Jack Woltz, a Hollywood fat cat who has defiantly stood up to Don Corleone, wakes up one morning in his bed. It all seems nice and innocent, but there’s a creepy feeling something not’s right. Bit by bit, he becomes aware there’s something else in his bed that shouldn’t be there. And some blood’s leaking from somewhere. What’s going on? What’s under there? He pulls back the sheet, takes one shocked look, and then begins howling in pain: it’s the severed head of his beloved horse.
I think the experts have learnt from that scene a few lessons about how to release bad news to the public. On Friday afternoon, Chief Coroner Judge Neil MacLean quite courageously released summary data about the enormous rate of suicides in New Zealand. We’ve come through years of not being told the true facts and the judge has decided that the issue of suicide is so serious that it needs to be revealed and discussed. Five hundred and fifty-eight Kiwis have killed themselves in the last year. That, let’s be honest, is a horse’s head.
It’s huge. Simply in terms of scale it’s more than the loss of life in the Wahine disaster, the Erebus disaster, and the Christchurch earthquake all rolled into one single year. Make that, every single year that goes by. Why is it never [normally] reported? Why isn’t it addressed as a pressing issue in our society? Is it less important than the weather forecast? Are 558 lives trivial compared to rugby? Life itself is asking us to wake up and to view this issue as the emergency it is.
I don’t know whose idea it was to release the suicide data on Friday afternoon, the day before the Tri Nations decider, but most people quite rightly had other things on their minds. And a casual reader wouldn’t have detected the awful truth by reading the online headlines. Here in the Capital, the daily paper boasted proudly “Wellington has 19 per cent suicide decrease”. Oh, how jolly. But 19 per cent of what? 100? 20? One? [We have yet to be told]. Christchurch’s Press had “Suicide numbers drop after quake”. And Auckland washed its hands with the bizarre headline: “Suicide rate drops after ChCh quake”. Dunedin didn’t even report it. Nothing changes, does it.
But Judge MacLean’s most significant comment was that the statistics show that what we’ve been doing in the past to confront suicide has not worked and so we now need “new solutions”. Note those words. They are the best comments I’ve ever heard from a public servant.
But if we in Wellington, or even we in New Zealand, want to address this national disaster, we need to gallop into battle on healthy, whole, steeds. Butchering the true facts and doctoring the headlines sabotage any hope we ever had.
It happens in The Godfather. Jack Woltz, a Hollywood fat cat who has defiantly stood up to Don Corleone, wakes up one morning in his bed. It all seems nice and innocent, but there’s a creepy feeling something not’s right. Bit by bit, he becomes aware there’s something else in his bed that shouldn’t be there. And some blood’s leaking from somewhere. What’s going on? What’s under there? He pulls back the sheet, takes one shocked look, and then begins howling in pain: it’s the severed head of his beloved horse.
I think the experts have learnt from that scene a few lessons about how to release bad news to the public. On Friday afternoon, Chief Coroner Judge Neil MacLean quite courageously released summary data about the enormous rate of suicides in New Zealand. We’ve come through years of not being told the true facts and the judge has decided that the issue of suicide is so serious that it needs to be revealed and discussed. Five hundred and fifty-eight Kiwis have killed themselves in the last year. That, let’s be honest, is a horse’s head.
It’s huge. Simply in terms of scale it’s more than the loss of life in the Wahine disaster, the Erebus disaster, and the Christchurch earthquake all rolled into one single year. Make that, every single year that goes by. Why is it never [normally] reported? Why isn’t it addressed as a pressing issue in our society? Is it less important than the weather forecast? Are 558 lives trivial compared to rugby? Life itself is asking us to wake up and to view this issue as the emergency it is.
I don’t know whose idea it was to release the suicide data on Friday afternoon, the day before the Tri Nations decider, but most people quite rightly had other things on their minds. And a casual reader wouldn’t have detected the awful truth by reading the online headlines. Here in the Capital, the daily paper boasted proudly “Wellington has 19 per cent suicide decrease”. Oh, how jolly. But 19 per cent of what? 100? 20? One? [We have yet to be told]. Christchurch’s Press had “Suicide numbers drop after quake”. And Auckland washed its hands with the bizarre headline: “Suicide rate drops after ChCh quake”. Dunedin didn’t even report it. Nothing changes, does it.
But Judge MacLean’s most significant comment was that the statistics show that what we’ve been doing in the past to confront suicide has not worked and so we now need “new solutions”. Note those words. They are the best comments I’ve ever heard from a public servant.
But if we in Wellington, or even we in New Zealand, want to address this national disaster, we need to gallop into battle on healthy, whole, steeds. Butchering the true facts and doctoring the headlines sabotage any hope we ever had.
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