Suicide, Social Media and Why ‘Be Kind’ Is Only The Beginning
Notes on mental illness and the complexity of cancel culture in the world of the instant.
Trigger warning: this article discusses suicide and mental illness which may be difficult to read if either of those issues are personal to you. If you are in need of immediate support, Samaritans and Give Us A Shout are endlessly brilliant sources of help.
“There is no way to talk about suicide that doesn’t seem reductive to some extent. No carefully-worded tweet, passionate Facebook rant or well-considered blog post can ever encompass the full range of unique, multifaceted and deeply interwoven factors that might lead someone to take their own life. For that reason, I’ve debated long and hard over whether or not to write about this subject. At times it has felt like a discussion I’m not qualified to contribute towards, despite suffering suicidal ideation for many of my teenage years, and at times it has seemed pointless to even try; the voices in the conversation already too many and too loud. But suicide has been the elephant in the room for a very long time, and running away from it will not change the fact that it has happened, it is happening right now, and it will happen again in the future. To me, it seems imperative to talk about it. The question is: how?
When news broke last Saturday of Caroline Flack’s untimely death, I could read about nothing else on any social media platform, no matter how hard I tried (and I really tried). Messages ranged from the standard ‘Rest In Peace, Angel’ to sentiments along the lines of, ‘she was an abuser –she deserved it’, and covered most of the ground in between. I became suddenly and unhappily aware of just how easy it is to contribute towards a stranger’s life – or in this case, death – without actually knowing anything about them. The variety of ‘takes’ I’d read in a matter of seconds, regarding Caroline, her death, her boyfriend(s) and her court case was astounding; I had not even had time to process the fact of her death, before I was forced into an internal debate about the reasons behind it.
I suppose the inevitable consequence of social media use is that our conversations get bigger and they get quicker. One person’s knee-jerk reaction to an event can soon evolve, becoming part of a wider, more persistent and more powerful narrative. And the overriding narrative in this case, it seemed, was the idea that the media itself – social or tabloid, or a combination of the two – was mostly to blame for Caroline’s death. I don’t doubt for a second that the months-long onslaught of hatred, judgement, accusations and assumptions she was subject to had a detrimental impact on Caroline’s mental health: it must be hard to imagine any kind of future when the world seems so intent to clutch onto your past. The internet is permanent and the public eye invasive, and having your every movement observed and analysed is bound to be suffocating.
But then I got confused. Because when we’re using social media to condemn social media, what are we doing? When we’re calling out people’s bad behaviour because they called out someone else’s bad behaviour, does anything improve? Or are we just repeating the same, dangerous cycle over and over again? Have we all become experts on suicide now, just as we were, a couple of months ago, experts on domestic abuse? The very fact that many of the messages disparaging Caroline were about her abuse case troubled me, too. Having conversations about domestic abuse is surely necessary – to the extent that it saves lives – and using celebrity stories as examples can be a useful way to initiate such conversations in the real world. It seems important not to let abuse go unrecognised, but how can we do so in a way that doesn’t create one villainous figurehead for the public to slander, and the media to incessantly hound?
“Being nice to her might have made Caroline Flack’s life more bearable, but it cannot solve the neurological factors that lead to suicide. Our suicidal friends and family members need medicine and treatment; they cannot simply be loved into health. ”
I don’t think there is a straightforward answer, to be honest. But I do think that most tabloid newspapers and their websites need reforming; the power they hold is too much in the hands of too few, and their tendency to value clicks over lives is toxic and damaging – it will never mesh well with whatever aims of kindness we have in mind.But I also think the phrase I have seen thrown around, the idea of ‘manslaughter by the media’, is a gross oversimplification of an incredibly complex problem: the ease with which we watch celebrities thrown under the bus goes deeper than the tweets written and articles published.
The sentiment posted by Caroline herself, which has been echoed thousands upon thousands of times on social media, that you should be kind, 'in a world where you can be anything', is one I wholeheartedly endorse. But I also think part of the problem is that this is not, right now, ‘a world where you can be anything', and sometimes that makes it very hard to be kind. I think that's why the fantasy of celebrity exists in the first place, right? The media cultivate envy in those to whom such wealth, beauty and ‘success’ feels unattainable, and then use it as a tool to make their clickbait popular. Unfortunately, we’ve just seen how well that works. It's what let the tabloids get away with publishing horrific articles about Caroline for so long, and it's what makes the general public so willing to use their own platforms to tear down those (especially women) who appear to have everything.
This is not to absolve the general public of responsibility, though; we can and we should be good to one another on an individual level. But it seems to me that we also need a kindness more radical – one that pervades public and political spaces, transforming the legal system from one of punishment into one of rehabilitation, and the mass media from a system of exploitation into one of support. We need a kindness that embraces and understands the scary side of mental illness, not just the more palatable, cover-up-able problems. Being nice to her might have made Caroline Flack’s life more bearable, but it cannot solve the neurological factors that lead to suicide. Our suicidal friends and family members need medicine and treatment; they cannot simply be loved into health.
I can’t unpack every aspect of Caroline’s death, because I don’t have all of the facts. And as with any suicide, even if I did have all of the facts it still wouldn’t make sense. I think if there is any take-away from all of this, it’s that it is impossible to know the full circumstances of someone else’s life: stranger, celebrity, or friend. But I’m sorry if you read this far hoping for or expecting answers, because I don’t have any. I just think as a starting point, we could all actively imagine what kind of world it is we want to live in, and then we could consider how that world can start to take shape. We are not here forever – as Caroline’s death only serves to prove – and we can only do the best we can with the time we have. But it is our responsibility to do so, if it means we can read fewer headlines that make our stomachs drop, feel safer and more secure in our own lives, and lose fewer friends and loved ones to the monster that is suicide.”
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To read more of Hayley’s words you can find her on Instagram at @hayleywx_ or Twitter @hayleywx_.