There's various forms of suicide. The form
of suicide we've talked about at the moment
in the community that I'm talking about here
are where you take your own life by an act.
Such as driving off Beachy Head, going for
a long swim through Lamorna Cove, jumping
in front of a train, driving your car at a
brick wall or a tree, or sleeping pills, those
are very clear acts of commission, single
acts of commission leading to your death by
suicide.

Those forms are rarer than what I call long-term
suicide, a suicide that occurs over a period
of months, sometimes over years, where you
stop caring about whether you live or die,
Thanatos becomes more important than Eros
in your life, the love of death is more attractive
and you take on the behaviors that will result
in your death but over a longer term. They're
still acts of commission, but they're not
as dramatic as driving off Beachy Head, driving
off a cliff, jumping in front of a train.
They take longer. The end result is the same.
But you are responsible, and you are unconscious
for longer before you commit suicide. It's
a longer drawn out process. And that's a very
painful suicide because it's not quick. It's
very long. It might involve people around
you caught up in a conspiracy with you to
either commit co-suicide or to assist you
in your suicide.
It depends who got you your life. A lot of
the gay men I've known who committed suicide,
either the quick suicide or the long term
suicide, are without any network, any support
system to catch them. No one much knows they're
alive, so when they're dead no one much notices
they're dead. And that's dangerous. And I
say to gay men, "get your support system,
your network, around you from the beginning,
support each other from the beginning, cause
suddenly when you need support, but haven't
built up a support network there's going to
be no one there." And so when you hit depression
and think about suicide, either dramatic,
quick, or long term, there's no one to share
this with, no one to discuss this with, there
is no one to bounce it off with. I have a
client at the moment in that position. He's
been diagnosed as very seriously clinically
depressed using the clinical HAD self-diagnostic
scheme in need of urgent counseling and they've
told him he qualifies but the waiting list
for what he wants which is cognitive behavioral
therapy is between two and three years in
London. Meanwhile he's talking to me. I'm
the only person he feels listens. he says
he's got no one else in his life. That he's
talking of going to the Dignitas clinic in
Zurich and committing euthanasia, and under
the mental health regime, because he's got
this diagnosis, I imagine also having AIDS
at the same time as the mental health diagnosis
he might well qualify under the Dignitas regulations
to be allowed to commit euthanasia at their
clinic. So, his was a longer suicide. But
I know many people in his position who are
contemplating long-term suicides because their
lives really are not worth living, so they
feel, and they're locked in repetitive behavior
patterns where they can't look at alternative
ways of behaving. They are living groundhog
lives. Everyday is like the day before and
it's going to be like the day to come. So
they're living each day over, and over, and
over. And it's "fuck it." Both shoes have
dropped. Because they're positive now everything
else drops, either dramatically, instantly,
or over the long term. And because the medication
is working, so that's not the cause of their
distress, although admittedly some of the
drugs in the combination therapy under which
they are committed to a lifetime of ingestion
have very severe and serious psychological
and psychiatric impact. All these drugs have
very serious effects on their psychology.
So you can't tease out what is depression
and what is a side effect of the drug for
instance. It hasn't been properly studied.
These young men and older men are in danger,
firstly from their drugs, secondly from their
isolation, and thirdly from their lack of
self-awareness of who they are and what they're
doing to themselves what their lives are like.
And then they embark on the plan of maybe
having a long-term suicide. Maybe they don't
call it that because that's an act of intelligent
naming. Maybe they don't do that. Maybe what
they do is live their lives, and I don't call
these lifestyles I call them death styles,
they have death styles that replace lifestyles,
that lead eventually to that open grave where
they will end up. And I've seen this happen
too often to say it doesn't happen. It needs
to be properly studied. And if someone presents
to the health service as in the need of counseling
to prevent their further deterioration or
eventual death or suicidal tendencies, they
need to be treated, not in three years' time
but now. And if they haven't got a network
around them, who are they going to talk to
about these things? I think people, gay men,
are dying needlessly because they either haven't
set up systems, and no systems exist out there
into which they can slot easily. Just recently
in London we had a young Eastern European
man, 23, who jumped off a tower block balcony,
because he had just been diagnosed HIV-positive.
And it was claimed he jumped because he found
out he was HIV-positive. I would challenge
that. I would say that anyone, any gay man who found
that the way out was suicide after an HIV-positive
diagnosis maybe was in line to commit suicide
for another reason anyway. Or they hadn't
done their research. Anyone becoming HIV-positive
now, can expect to live a full and normal
life and die of old age if they box clever, if they take precautions
that I've already mentioned such as avoiding
recreational drugs, such as avoiding unsafe
sex. you don't want to take a single pathogen
into your life. But if suicide is the only
way out, after your diagnosis, I'll say your
life wasn't working anyway, and this was a
way out for you. I've known many gay men in
the past who committed suicide, but this was
the first wave of AIDS, I'm talking of the late 80s, when
there literally was no way out, as far as
medication was concerned, there were no drugs
that worked, and then they thought, well I'm
going to drive off a cliff, I'm going to drive
off, jump off Beachy Head, I'm going to go
for a long swim and not come back. The most
glamorous suicide was a friend of mine, who
swam out from Lamorna Cove in Cornwall, into
the moonlight and never came back. But that
was 1987. Anyone contemplating suicide today
as a result of an HIV diagnosis has
not examined all their options. There are
many options, many alternatives.