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Last week, the government announced the launch of its national suicide prevention strategy. With it comes the expected array of miserable statistics: those most at risk of killing themselves are young men, loss and bereavement are major triggers of self-destruction, low income and poor housing are significant factors in predisposing someone to a mental health problem.

The strategy itself has a very New Labour feel, that familiar mixture of moral zest, policy thoroughness and the inevitable jargon. I am not a cynic but there is something about initiatives like the officially-sponsored Calm (the Campaign Against Living Miserably - see the Department of Health website) and stated targets such as the aim to "reduce suicides by one-fifth by the year 2010" that bring out the latent satirist in me.

You don't have to invoke Orwell to understand the potentially obfuscating power of official language. We would much rather read an individual writer on the subject of despair than any number of policy documents on the official prevention of misery. Official world views are boring precisely because of what they suppress. They deal only with human beings en masse; not the particular human experience and its most uncomfortable and interesting truths.

But can governments really stop people trying to kill themselves? Well, yes and no. Witnessing an old friend struggle with serious suicidal impulses over the past few months, I know at first hand how complex and profound one person's sadness and fear can be. Individual unhappiness can't be waylaid by moral dicta or cheering platitudes. Despair is often an entirely logical, if skewed, reaction to real cruelties and deprivations.

On the other hand, government can implement an array of important practical measures that stop people like my friend killing themselves when they might still find hope. In the US, the widespread availability of guns vastly increases the opportunity for self harm. Gun control is therefore sensible for this as for so many reasons. Removing all potential instruments of danger from prison cells, selling paracetamol in smaller size packets, suicide proofing major bridges and other danger spots are all examples of important practical reforms.

But the big structural changes are just as vital too: boosting the low incomes, replacing the poor housing that government reports have made mention of for decades, in terms of aggravating every single social problem going. On this front, we can say only that New Labour is a cross between a contradiction and a mystery. In many ways, it is a most passionate administration. It pursues many policies designed to give us a fairer, if not more equal, society. Yet how few of us are certain that we are witnessing any tangible social change?


I have talked already about the clash between official language and reality. There is also a stark mismatch in contemporary culture between official models of success as a human being and our own private knowledge of the range of human feeling and experience. In my elder daughter's classroom, there is a box for children to post their worries to their teacher, part of the new culture of emotional literacy among the young that I hope will endure.

Yet in the grown up world, it still seems hard for people to talk about doubts, worries, failures and fears without shame. Business and politics seem particularly vulnerable to this macho culture. Those who are most successful in government, like our dear esteemed Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, seem to be those who find it easiest to keep their emotions under wraps.

I am not suggesting a collective outpouring of vulnerabilities. I happen to admire a measure of self-containment. While disliking the sentimentality and emotional outpouring generated around the life and death of a figure such as Princess Diana, one can't help but acknowledge the impact she had as a public figure so prepared to admit to vulnerability. What a pity there are not more people prepared to be that open. Their honesty might, in turn, help others forgive themselves for their own frailty and give them the chance to enjoy, not destroy, the one and only life they have been given.

- A copy of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England can be downloaded from www.doh.gov.uk/mentalhealth/suicideprevention.pdf

Melissa Benn is a journalist and novelist.