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[/audioplayer]If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/ It brings on many changes/ And I can take or leave it if I please’.
However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it. Suicide, as commonly practised by amateurs, is not painless: it is frequently agonising, complicated, botched and has ample potential to leave one still alive but with a cruel legacy of permanently damaged health to add to one’s existing woes.
Many of us nonetheless carry the very notion of suicide around in a pocket of our psyche as a brutal form of hidden comfort, like second world war spies with their little cyanide pills.
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