Self murder – trying to face the unimaginable
It is a statement of fact, and it happened last week in France. As this is posted we still do not know what actually happened, but because there is so much coverage of this as a case of planned suicide it needs to be looked at.
First and foremost it must be addressed because the risk is that the stigma around suicide will be made worse by this fatal crash. Those already suffering the agony of profound depression are so fragile that something like this can easily stop them from seeking help for fear of being judged, branded, marked as being weak, damaged or dangerous. It could also stop people from asking for help or medical support for fear of losing their jobs, because this is what it is claimed that pilot did—hiding his mental and physical state from his employers, repeatedly.
If it was a pilot suicide it is another on a painful list. There have been eight recorded pilot suicides on commercial flights in the past forty years.
Much of the news coverage since this latest devastation has also talked of the crash of an Egypt Air flight in 1999 that killed 217 people. By comparison the recent crash is described as being ‘the second biggest pilot suicide’.
Does that help in anyway at all? It is comforting to know that someone you loved was killed in ‘the second biggest’ case of pilot suicide? Is it constructive for the family of the pilot to know that their relation was responsible for the ‘second biggest’?
It is insulting to everyone who was killed by the pilot, to their families, and for anyone in the aviation industry who now has to find a way to carry on doing their job.
News cycles turn. We know this—the cruelly tender enquiries of journalists in search of an exclusive from grief-stricken family story fly in the face of all that is human, but this is the nature of news. And then the cycle goes on, around again, leaving all those that are grief-stricken to fend for themselves.
How can we confront this, the idea of someone who commits suicide and murder at the same? How do you get back on a plane again if you an anxious flier? How do you get back on board if this is your job, if you are a pilot, or any member of a crew? How does anyone contend with the agony of knowing that someone they loved was intentionally killed as the result of someone else’s suicide?
The following statement cannot help or comfort but it is very important to understand. When someone kills themselves they are incapable of thinking of anyone else in that moment in rational, human, or emotional terms. This lack of responsibility is almost never deliberate, and again it is very, very rare that there is an intention to kill others.
Suicide is a final act of absolute desperation. The mind has one single point of focus, and no other thought has the power enters into the mental firestorm that triggers this final act of despair.
To ask why, or to try and imagine what could have been done to alter what happened is only to start a cycle of mental torture that will never end.
It is so profoundly human to need to find meaning in death. We crave to understand, to find a reason, something we can grasp in order to make sense of the vast loss. Suicide offers no answers, only more questions. It is how we react that is the lesson.
As the days pass we will read the news, and hear the strained voices of shocked families as they try to grapple with the enormity of this kind of violence to self and to others. Many of us will want to turn off, or turn away, because it is too painful to imagine this being done to someone we love, or to try and understand what it means to come so desperate, so profoundly broken, as to do something like this. And then most of us will move on, turning with the news cycle, because this is something too agonising to think about.
I do hope that we can find it in ourselves to face it for long enough to become braver about understanding why people resort to suicide. Every time we turn away we miss a chance of learning how to recognise the signs, in others, or ourselves. We miss the chance to begin understanding ourselves more, of becoming psychologically stronger, and less afraid of reaching out and asking for help, or of holding out our hand to someone who needs it.