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There's a move afoot in Canada to have a dedicated 911 line for suicide prevention, similar to the 988 service offered in many parts of the U.S. Clearly suicide is not a new problem, but as mental health worsens amid pandemic restrictions, concern is growing proportionately. Here's what Crisis Services Canada have to say on the matter:
https://suicideprevention.ca/COVID-19
And here is a list of crisis lines, not just for Canada but for other countries as well:
https://thelifelinecanada.ca/help/call/
In the U.K., my brother used to volunteer with The Samaritans - I'm guessing the closest local equivalent would be the Distress Centre, although we also have a Kids' Help Phone and various special-purpose services such as those geared to the LGBT+ community.
Suicide, whether contemplated, averted or achieved, also features widely in literature and film. Many will be familiar with the 1946 holiday film classic "It's A Wonderful Life" in which George Bailey decides that he does want to keep living after all, once his guardian angel has shown him what his world, as he's lived it, would have been like if he'd never been born.
The book I'm reading now, The Midnight Library, offers another spin on the idea. Thirty-five year-old Nora Seed has decided to end it all. Then we get brief flashbacks to what happened nineteen years before she reached that decision, then 27 hours before, 9 hours, five hours, and so on, until she comes to write her suicide note.
At the zero hour, she find herself in a library, with a librarian who reminds her of her school librarian from 19 years ago. But this is no ordinary library - it's a library between life and death. All the books in it are the story of her life. But that doesn't mean they are all copies of the same book.
Then there's The Book of Regrets. It's a very heavy book. Well, wouldn't you expect that someone who had decided to end it all would have plenty of regrets about how she's lived her life?
So she picks a regret. Her cat died and she regrets that she didn't look after him better. She asks the librarian for the version of her life in which she kept the cat inside so he couldn't get run over. She lives that life for the next dozen pages or so until she finds herself getting dissatisfied with that alternate version of her life too ... at which point she finds herself back in the library, where she can ask the librarian for a different version of her biography. And so it goes.
Well, I guess when you get to a certain age, you're bound to have a number of "should'ves" in life. Matt Haig's book The Midnight Library adds a few layers of complexity to the storyline of those feel-good Christmas movies. I mean sure, if George Bailey had never been born, his brother would have drowned instead of becoming a war hero. The druggist would have poisoned a bunch of patients. Then again, maybe his wife would have become the Librarian of Congress and Annie the maid would have been a Black Lives Matter heroine with her picture on the ten-dollar bill. You never know.
Still, the book is feel-good in some ways. It might make you feel better about not having done some of the things that you think you should have done. I'm not sure that it will prevent any suicides, but that's a pretty tall order for any book. And this one is definitely worth a read.
https://suicideprevention.ca/COVID-19
And here is a list of crisis lines, not just for Canada but for other countries as well:
https://thelifelinecanada.ca/help/call/
In the U.K., my brother used to volunteer with The Samaritans - I'm guessing the closest local equivalent would be the Distress Centre, although we also have a Kids' Help Phone and various special-purpose services such as those geared to the LGBT+ community.
Suicide, whether contemplated, averted or achieved, also features widely in literature and film. Many will be familiar with the 1946 holiday film classic "It's A Wonderful Life" in which George Bailey decides that he does want to keep living after all, once his guardian angel has shown him what his world, as he's lived it, would have been like if he'd never been born.
The book I'm reading now, The Midnight Library, offers another spin on the idea. Thirty-five year-old Nora Seed has decided to end it all. Then we get brief flashbacks to what happened nineteen years before she reached that decision, then 27 hours before, 9 hours, five hours, and so on, until she comes to write her suicide note.
At the zero hour, she find herself in a library, with a librarian who reminds her of her school librarian from 19 years ago. But this is no ordinary library - it's a library between life and death. All the books in it are the story of her life. But that doesn't mean they are all copies of the same book.
Then there's The Book of Regrets. It's a very heavy book. Well, wouldn't you expect that someone who had decided to end it all would have plenty of regrets about how she's lived her life?
So she picks a regret. Her cat died and she regrets that she didn't look after him better. She asks the librarian for the version of her life in which she kept the cat inside so he couldn't get run over. She lives that life for the next dozen pages or so until she finds herself getting dissatisfied with that alternate version of her life too ... at which point she finds herself back in the library, where she can ask the librarian for a different version of her biography. And so it goes.
Well, I guess when you get to a certain age, you're bound to have a number of "should'ves" in life. Matt Haig's book The Midnight Library adds a few layers of complexity to the storyline of those feel-good Christmas movies. I mean sure, if George Bailey had never been born, his brother would have drowned instead of becoming a war hero. The druggist would have poisoned a bunch of patients. Then again, maybe his wife would have become the Librarian of Congress and Annie the maid would have been a Black Lives Matter heroine with her picture on the ten-dollar bill. You never know.
Still, the book is feel-good in some ways. It might make you feel better about not having done some of the things that you think you should have done. I'm not sure that it will prevent any suicides, but that's a pretty tall order for any book. And this one is definitely worth a read.
