suffering of men in battle. Suicide, particularly male suicide, is not a freak or outlandish occurrence. These numbers are the aggregate of thousands upon thousands of unique untold stories of men who didn’t make it. And there are many thousands more who struggle not to join them.
David is a kindly, furrow-browed man of 55 who lives alone. He has no extended family, and is at his most content when out driving or seeing to his work at a local garage. The day we met, he was wearing a rugby shirt over his broad frame and talking in a soft-spoken voice that tends to the sorrowful. “One day I’m great, I’m terrific,” he told me, left hand slightly rummaging in the palm of his right. “The next, I’m low, I’m thinking of suicide, about the ways that I can die.” For some, the contemplation of death is constant elevator muzak amid life’s ups and downs, sometimes inaudible, other times capable of drowning out everything else and stopping the doors from opening
“At that point, it just feels like you don’t really care what happens,” said David. “You’re quite adamant. Today’s the day.”
2
A Very Modern Suicide
Although I’ve always been super chill, I’ve been feeling a lot of anger lately at the slightest thing, and I do not like it one bit.
Why do they leave? It’s a heart-wrenching, unavoidable question. Seeking to understand is, in a sense, to demand the impossible – to know what the dead were thinking. Suicide is an act that eliminates the testimony of the only witness who could really know the answer. Notes are only left behind in around a quarter of cases, final postscripts seeking to explain or blame, comfort or wound, often just to apologise for the hurt to follow. However, with the life progressions of the young now scrupulously etched online, sometimes more clues are left behind by those who leave far too early.
In most of his YouTube videos, the young man has headphones on, head twitching intently to the beat, fingers flashing up and down the fretboard of his bass guitar. His talent had gained him a following; some of these videos attracted 20, 30, even 40 thousand views. One is different. In it he sits in front of the camera without his guitar, just a boy, a red-haired, matter-of-fact boy. He’s shy and serious, quietly giving carefully thought-out answers to questions from his online following. His face, his eyes, are soft and vulnerable. This is Brett Robertshaw.
A few clicks leads to his page on Ask.fm, a site where young people answer questions about themselves posted by other users. Here, while Brett’s answers are generally funny, sharp and acerbic, a few give pause.
Question: What was the last lie you told? Brett: I’m ok. Question: Your (sic) in your own movie are you the good guy or the bad guy? and why? Brett: I’m the extra, because fuck that shit.
One click. An abruptly curtailed Twitter feed appears. Brett wrote over 7,500 tweets in under three years, an average of seven a day, to a band of 152 followers. No more do the random thoughts of the young dissipate into the air, or hide in diaries and journals. Scanning Brett’s tweets reveals much that is typical of a young male: his passionate opinions on boxing, his views on films and computer games, his slightly goofy banter. Records of infrequent train trips from his home in the northern seaside town of Blackpool to London. Persistent boredom with what he called the “’orrible north”. But then, among them, scattergun bursts of tweets suddenly crescendo forth from nowhere, expressing sadness and resignation.
13 April: It’s times like this that I just feel like I’m done, that there’s nothing I can do to feel better. I’m fighting a losing battle. 13 April: Somebody please remind me why I’m still here.
He reveals struggles to sleep. Coping with alcohol. Self-lacerating loneliness. A traumatic visit to a doctor. Medication. A mind-running over. A month on, in May, there seems more anger and fear.
10 May: Why is it so fucking difficult for me to function as a normal person, instead of being so damn useless? 10 May: No matter who says otherwise, I don’t feel like I have anybody that I can actually talk to anymore. I hate being this scared just to talk.
It seems it was a few days later, on 14 May, that Brett began to carefully write a long message for his personal website, a space normally reserved for posting bass guitar tablature. It began with a heart-breaking sentence. “The truth is, if this post is live, then chances are, I’m probably not here any more.”
With perfect grammar, he described a life “void of all emotions except sadness and worry”, where worst-case scenarios ruled and self-esteem was low. He wrote of “friendships” with inverted commas. His guitar playing, so impressive, so admired, was, he wrote, “just something that passed the time a bit”. To be complimented on it made him feel worse. When he finally sought treatment, worry about the appointments prevented him sleeping, while antidepressants made him feel nauseous. “Any attempt to get better,” he wrote, “seemed to go the opposite way and make me feel worse”. He concluded his letter by making it clear where he felt the blame lay. “It’s entirely my own fault, and only my own lack of willpower and strength of mind is to blame.”
He didn’t post the letter that day. His tweeting continued through June, but there would be no more sudden bursts of online sadness. On 2 July, Brett posted a final video to YouTube. In it, he mouths the words to the chorus of the alternative song he’s playing along with, never looking at the camera: “Oh my god there must be something, something to take the pain away. And so there’s nothing you can give me. It’s probably better off that way”.
On 5 July, the summer day when he ended his life at his home, Brett Robertshaw was still only 21 years old. Grieving family members speak of a young man who made them laugh. They never thought he was at that stage. The letter he had carefully typed out automatically posted to his website one week later.
3
The Great Paradox
Every suicidal person has a story as unique as their own fingerprint …
Could the deaths of Brett and thousands of others like him be predicted? At the Solace Centre, one of David’s friends sat in front of me and carefully explained that while life stressors may be triggers, the members’ mental health issues are to be blamed on faulty brain chemistry. There seemed to be comfort found in translating the extreme, often erratic fluctuations of the brain into the even scientific language of neurotransmitters, of serotonin, oestrogen, and dopamine.
Is it possible that certain brains have a genetic predisposition towards suicidal behaviour?
Dr Zachary Kaminsky, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Science at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, certainly thinks so. He is one of the scientists searching for what has colloquially been termed a “suicide gene”. “Stress is like driving,” Kaminsky told me. “You can drive really fast, and that can be useful, but you have to be able to slow down.” His team compared brains of those who died by suicide and those who didn’t. They had an inkling that for those who died by suicide, a gene called SKA2 was, in effect, acting as a faulty brake pad, failing to control stress.
Their results were fascinating. By looking at this single gene, Kaminsky’s team were able to predict with 80-90% accuracy whether an individual in their research group had thoughts of suicide or had made an attempt.[1] More research is needed, but signs are positive that, in the future, a blood test may provide some indication of suicide risk. Whether SKA2 could shed light on gender differences in suicide is not yet clear. “It is linked with the cortisol system, and this system does interact with the oestrogen system,” mused Kaminsky when I asked. “So I suppose it’s possible.”
Many others, such as Professor Rory O’Connor, a psychologist at Glasgow University who was recently elected President of the International Academy of Suicide Research, are wary of the idea that there is some magic “suicide gene” to find. “It’s just a vulnerability factor, a test will never tell us why.” It’s that “why” question