A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting to save her job while suffering from depression and thoughts of putting an end to it all, only to switch on the radio and hear from people who have had suicidal thoughts themselves or who have suffered the peculiar, awful grief of losing someone to suicide. The film was affecting and sensitively done, but after listening to In Memoriam: Conversations on a Bench (Radio 4) I realised how different the impact of radio can be. It was not that the film had in any way glamorised depression, or turned us as viewers into voyeurs revelling in someone else’s misfortune. But listening to the pain seeping through the ether from those who were dealing with grief and loss or from their own black thoughts was so much more powerful than simply watching as the camera lingered on the ashen face of the woman, on her dull-eyed gaze, on her clumsy, laboured, downtrodden walk.
In Memoriam (produced by Adam Fowler) was based on such a simple idea. Anna Scott-Brown sat on a bench in an Oxford park for a few days and talked to the people who lingered there for a while, asking them how often they came to sit on the bench, why they had come on that day, what the inscription makes them think of. The bench is dedicated to Chris, who took his own life in 2004, leaving a wife and children. But there is nothing on the bench to tell you this. The dedication, from Chris’s wife, says simply, ‘Rest awhile and remember happy times together.’ Scott-Brown discovers, though, that more than half of the people who did stop to take a pause from life, to opt out of being busy for a minute or two, either knew someone who had committed suicide or had suffered from life-threatening depression themselves.
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