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PAUL KELLY: Thank you very much, and I hope you understand the Irish brogue,
the Irish accent, I hope it doesn't cause any major problems here this morning.
I'm very truly honoured to be invited here today.
It's a strange sort of journey for me in a way because it's only a short time ago that
my younger sister Sharon died by suicide, and it's quite extraordinary, one of the things
she planned to do before she died was to come to Australia for a year,
she was going off backpacking with her friends and she planned to come
to New Zealand as well, so I've got mixed emotions today.
You know, my heart is breaking in a personal way, but today I try to honour her, and honour
her legacy, and honour what a beautiful sister she was to me.
And it's times like this that I'm reminded of the importance of making a connection.
And sadly through our work in Console, we know that so many people who die by suicide have
in some way become disconnected, perhaps from their traditional supports, their friends
and family, or even disconnected from their own sense of self and purpose.
By being here today you and others have already made that important connection
with others who care enough about suicide that they work around the clock
to prevent the next terrible tragedy.
Today is not a time to speak, rather it is a time to listen, it is a time to hold the
vital space, keeping faith and vigil with those who feel sick with shock,
numb with grief, abandoned, desperate, alone.
Consolation is precious, to console is to give comfort, refuge,
protection and love to those who are in pain.
At Console we have been doing just that for the last ten years, helping put shattered
lives back together again, bearing witness to grief and pain, not just offering hope
but being the hope at the other end of the phone, at the other end of a life from which
its owner has chosen carefully or suddenly to step out.
Every year in Ireland over five hundred people do just that.
At a particular moment the greatest desire they have for
and out of their life is to end it.
Often we don't know why, but we do know the consequences, the empty chair at the table,
the sound of the key in the door, the quick heavy step up the path,
the tubs of hair gel half-used on the bathroom shelf, the signature scent,
the dream of grandchildren are all no more.
Instead there's pain, torture, unending cruelty to the heart, the mind, the soul,
and where there is, there is Console.
And it really was from that personal tragedy, from that deep-rooted grief
that I came to found Console.
My younger sister Sharon, as I said, at the age of twenty-one,
she had her whole life ahead of her.
She was the most beautiful child you could meet and the most affectionate.
A very high achiever, the life and soul of the party as they say,
but she was a wonderful sister and she was the baby in my family.
I come from a very large Irish family, there was twelve of us in the family
so you can imagine... a good Catholic country...
so she came as a big surprise, she was the baby and a great blessing to us.
And of course being her big brother I felt very protective of her because
she brought us great joy, because we were all grown-up and she was going off,
and she was excelling in school, in college, and she was an all-rounder in
sport and music, and had a large circle of friends, and she had a great life, she had
so much to look forward to and great potential for the future.
And, you know, I will never forget the day when it happened because I was driving into
work and my phone rang in the car and it was a local policeman who said to me,
'Paul, are you driving alone', and I said 'yes'.
'Could you pull in', he says, and... which I did, he says...
and I knew my sister was out with friends the night before because she was...
they went off to celebrate the fact that they were going to Australia and coming to
New Zealand, and it was sort of a send-off party and we were all delighted for her,
and we were all helping her out with...
you know, I was giving her some money towards the trip, my mum and dad were very excited
for her, and when I'd call in to the house she'd be there with her friends with the big
maps, planning their route around Australia, where they were going to visit and where they
were going to go in New Zealand, and we were so excited for her, you know.
And I remember, you know, when he said to me 'Paul, you know, it's about your sister
Sharon', when this policeman said it to me, I was worried, I just thought that she was
in a road traffic accident because I knew she was out with her friends the night before,
celebrating her departure to Australia, and I knew she...
she used to drive, you see, and I was worried in case she had taken a drink, or she was...
it was a drink-driving issue.
But he asked him to meet me at the entrance of our local general hospital,
and when I went to the hospital he was waiting for me with other police officers,
and my mother was in the back of the police car.
And I'll never forget it, it happened so quickly, he just came over to my car, he said to me
'Paul, your sister Sharon was found dead this morning, we suspect it's suicide,
we need you to come into casualty to identify her.
Your mother's in the back of the police car, she's not aware of what's happened,
she's in a state of shock, there was nobody at home when we called.'
And I'll never forget that moment, you know, our lives came crashing down, and having to
go in there, and having to, you know, identify my young sister who was there from the night
before, and trying to bring her back to life, and trying to breathe life back into her,
and the screams of my mother as she tried to bring back her child to life. Her baby.
And, you know, we were left, like most families, with the...
with the legacy of suicide which is 'Why?'.
Like why did our... why did my sister do this, you know.
She was the baby in the family, was... you know, she was deeply, deeply loved,
was our love not enough?
And if only we'd have known that she was in crisis
we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent it.
And if she... you know, and the truth is that if she had been struggling with mental illness,
or chronic depression, or had a trauma in her life I think we could have coped better,
but there were so many unanswered, unanswerable questions for us.
And, you know, the other big piece for us was the element of choice,
the fact that she chose to end her life.
And she left a little note saying goodbye to us all individually,
but there were genuinely no clues as to why she had done this.
Just saying goodbye to us, and she was sorry about what she was about to do.
And the impact that had on my family was just...
I mean I felt I'd failed her as a brother, because I looked out for her, I protected
her, and, you know, that was nothing compared to what my mother and father felt.
They felt they had... they felt a great sense of guilt.
My mother used to say to me 'Paul, how could we have missed it? I mean how could we not...
how could we not know?' because we were a very close family, you know, I'm not saying
we're perfect by any means, a normal family, had our ups and downs like any family,
but we were genuinely close and blood was thicker than water as we'd say in Ireland,
and if a person was going through...
a member of the family was going through a rough patch
we'd all rally round and support him.
And I felt I knew my sister because I was her confidante, I was the person that she
shared all her little secrets with - if she was going through a break-up with her boyfriend,
or she had a row with my mother and father, or there were problems of any nature,
she used to open up to me and I felt that I was her...
you know, I felt that I was her big brother, that I could support her and guide her,
and I wanted to be there for her.
So, you know, we were left bereft, and I saw my mother for...
and my mother and father, and, you know, we all...
I realised very quickly that this was a different type of grief, a more protracted grief,
because of the element of choice, the fact that she chose to end her life.
And also on top of that I remember, you know, my mother gave up on life.
I mean I used to say to my mum... which maybe...
I've been told since I shouldn't have said it, but I used to say to mum 'What about us,
what about the grandchildren?', you know, she gave up on life, life no longer had meaning
for her because she felt, you know, she used to say to me 'Paul...',
she just blamed herself and she felt terribly...
she just felt this terrible deep guilt about the whole thing and how
she as a mother could not protect her daughter.
It's a natural innate instinct, and, you know, it crushed her, it literally crushed her,
and then very shortly after that my mother died, and she died of a broken heart.
There's no doubt about that, and my father followed very shortly. He gave up too.
So the impact of suicide in my family was quite...
was quite, you know, it was quite catastrophic really,
it ripped our family apart, and the pain...
I never envisaged in my life I'd be standing here today talking about suicide,
I come from a business background and it was never on my radar, you know,
to be talking at conferences like this about my sister.
But today I honour her, and I'll always remember her.
And what happened at the time was because...
it was really out of my anger, I think, looking back on it, because there were no real...
there were no dedicated services in Ireland at the time for those bereaved through suicide.
And, you know, I remember trying to get my mother counselling at the time,
and there were only generic bereavement services.
And about after the fourth visit my... the counsellor came out to me and says to me 'Paul,
I can't continue with this.' And my mother at that point gave up.
And I understood why, from a counselling perspective, that, you know, there were...
my mother... there were so many unanswered, unanswerable questions.
And I felt at that time there was a deep need for a dedicated bereavement service
for those bereaved through suicide because of the complexity of it and
because, as I mentioned earlier, the element of choice.
And the fact that I could see that people who were bereaved through suicide
were very vulnerable and were very at risk, and as I said my mother gave up on life,
and she did give up on life and her life ended.
So, you know, to work... I didn't...
I was working through my own grief, and my own pain, and devastation, and anger,
and frustration about the whole thing, I started to investigate it further.
And how... because I thought we were the only family on our...
you know, mental health is a big... was a sort of...
there was a major stigma around it at home in Ireland, mental health issues.
Suicide, when I was growing up, it wasn't ever mentioned strangely enough,
and of course suicide only became decriminalised in Ireland in 1979, it was not that long ago,
and being a Catholic country if you were...
if a member of your family died by suicide they would not be buried on consecrated
ground, so there was all sorts of issues, so it was a major stigma around suicide and
around mental health, mental illness should I say.
So, you know, from that, then,
I went to our Government Ministers, and I see there's some Government...
just some people representing Government here today, and I tried to convince them to allow
me to establish a dedicated counselling and support service
for those bereaved through suicide, and to help me fund it.
And of course they expressed their sympathy, and they said 'Paul, we've no intentions of
doing that', you know, I mean they were very sympathetic and they...
they said 'we're sorry for...', you know, '...for your loss, and that,
but it's not on our... it's not something that we're going to do',
because you've got to understand that mental health in Ireland has been what they call it...
they call it the Cinderella of the mental health services.
I mean the budget for mental health is quite abysmal, and in fact the budget for suicide
prevention in Ireland is only four million Euros compared to forty million for the Road
Traffic Authority whose task it is to reduce road traffic deaths on our roads in Ireland,
so that gives you some indication as to, you know, the priority.
But I didn't give up because, you know, it's amazing what drove me, it really was, you
know, I felt no other family should go through this, and it came as an awful shock to me
when I discovered through my own research in Ireland, with a population of only 4.3
million people we had over five hundred people dying by suicide.
And, you know, they are the figures, they're the official stats, and then when I explored
even further because of our Coroner system in Ireland, where you've got unrecorded deaths,
I discovered very quickly that the rate would be far higher because they were...
there was about six hundred people actually dying in Ireland through suicide
each year, most of them young males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four.
And another statistic that shocked me at the time, and still continues to shock me because
it's rising is there was over twelve thousand people in Ireland last year presented at our
hospital A&E departments having engaged in acts of deliberate self-harm and attempted
suicide, so we've a very serious problem with this whole area of suicide, and self-harm,
and mental health issues in Ireland.
But anyhow I didn't give up, as I said, and I managed to gather round me some people who
would support me, so I started up a helpline, because there were little groups beginning
to develop around Ireland because the communities were being...
there was great... there were so many clusters of suicides developing, so many little groups
coming together, mostly bereaved people who were traumatised by suicide, and communities
that were traumatised by suicide, and they set up little support groups.
So from my house where I lived out in the country I had...
I set up a helpline, really, and I used to just...
really I was like a referral pathway.
I would say to people 'this is where you go if you need help, there's a support group
here, there's a support group there'.
And within a very short space of time I realised that I was out of my depth, even though I
did a bit of training on telephone support and that, but I realised very quickly I was
out of my depth because the type of calls I was getting were quite traumatic calls from
people who were on the brink of ending their lives, so I had to go and get...
I had to go and get additional help.
So I'm going to bring you on the journey of how Console...
what we do in Console, and how I established it, but basically really from that I don't
want to make it sound too easy, it was very difficult to establish this service, to get
stakeholders, to get funders, to get people to rally, to have faith in me, to have trust
in me, to believe in me, because I was just...
I'm not a clinician, I'm not a therapist, I'm just somebody who's been bereaved through
suicide, and trying to convince others that, you know, there was a real need for this type
of dedicated service, it was a difficult task, you've got to understand that, and I didn't
have the knowledge, if you know what I mean, because I'm just an ordinary layperson.
But anyhow, thankfully something... some...
I came across the most extraordinary people who rallied behind me and gave me great support
on the journey, and what I established was a national...
a twenty-four hour helpline for those bereaved through suicide, a professional counselling
service for those who were bereaved through suicide, and...
which provides group therapy, family therapy, and supports.
So I'm going to go through some of the services that we provide in Console as a national service,
and I hope I get this right with this clicky thing here, now...
I don't know how to do this...
That goes to show you I'm not really used to this, you know, here we go.
I've just given you my story.
Now you can see there, from the stats there, it gives you some indication, as you can see
there, the rates of suicide in Ireland they're quite high for a population of 4.3 million.
And they... there's been a steady increase, and in fact as you can see more males die.
You can see over the years there, 2004, 2005, right up to 2011, there was five hundred and
twenty-five people recorded having died by suicide in 2011,
and as you can see most of them were young males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four,
and the rest were young female deaths.
So that gives you some indication as to the problem...
as to the enormity of the problem we're dealing with in Ireland.
Suicide in Ireland – out of the twenty-six EU countries Ireland has the sixth lowest
rate of death by suicide, the fourth highest youth rates of suicide,
and the male suicide rate in Ireland has increased from 8.4 in 1980 to 20 in 2009.
And the type of work we're engaged in in Console is, as you can see there, we help others to
understand the grieving process, to work with them to normalise their grief,
to bring understanding to the differences with suicide grief.
We work with many different grief reactions included complicated grief.
Work with associated risks and crises.
Help families and children.
Provide support after hospital discharge.
Instil hope and foster post-traumatic growth.
Bring others to a place of acceptance and renewal.
Now the type of people that we hire in Console, there would be...
a lot of people who work with Console they're...
a lot of people have been touched or bereaved through suicide, but we have a very...
we employ a lot of clinical people, people who would be family therapists, psychotherapists,
counselling psychologists, accredited counsellors because we are often dealing with life and
death situations, so it's a very specialised area of work in supporting those bereaved
through suicide because we often find that people who come to us having been bereaved
through suicide, they're like my mother, they're often very much at risk of suicide themselves,
and that's often... that often emerges through therapy, and so the work we do is very...
it's really, as they say, postvention, the work we do is prevention.
Now you can see there's a whole host of services we provide.
We... as I said we offer a twenty-four hour helpline in Ireland for those bereaved through
suicide, we offer practical help and information, we do individual and couple and family counselling,
child psychotherapy – we work with children and adolescents who have been bereaved through
suicide or who are at risk of suicide and often present with suicidal ideation or self-harming,
so that's a very important piece of our work.
Group therapy and support.
And those group supports, there are two different types of group supports we have.
We have... we've group supports, weekly drop-in groups
where people can join a support group and meet others.
They're facilitated by our therapists, and they can link in with other people
who have been bereaved through suicide.
And then we have eight-week programme support groups.
And then we've recently developed a mother's group
for mothers who've lost loved-ones to suicide.
So those groups have been very effective, because not everybody needs...
not everybody needs professional counselling or therapy,
sometimes the support groups are very, very, very supportive.
We do community outreach supports as well,
because in Ireland we've had some very serious problems around the country
with clusters of suicide, and we'd have to respond, and the Irish government,
the Irish Health Service would ask Console to move into an area for crisis intervention,
to offer crisis supports in those communities, and to support the communities.
We do a lot of community training, we train up different groups in the communities how
to respond when a suicide occurs in their community, and how...
and we have different training programmes which I'll discuss with you later.
We do workshops and conferences and seminars, we're involved in education and training,
and we also have a suicide prevention programme we run in the schools which basically with
the young students, you know, I suppose the message we try to get out in a simple way
is that, you know, with these young people, with the young students, is that, you know,
life can be difficult.
We all experience crises in our lives, it's part of our shared humanity, but the important
thing is not to get stuck there, it's to seek help and to talk, and to find somebody who
you can confide in, and that's a very important piece of our work.
Now again it's... we have been very...
and we've been working with the Irish government in the Irish Health Service in developing
standards around here, national quality standards for the provision of suicide bereavement services,
and that was a major piece of work we undertook so that we could have some quality, some standard,
some framework for organisations or agencies who'd be involved in the work of suicide prevention
counselling and therapeutic work, that there would be some sort of standard set.
So we worked with the Irish Department of Health in establishing those standards and
those quality framework which was a wonderful piece of work to do, because we really feel
in that sense we are making a real difference.
Console there, we are also involved in different publications.
Again, as you can see there, Breaking the Silence in the Workplace.
There's a serious issue with suicide in the workplace,
people completing suicides in their workplace, people...
people being bereaved by suicide in their workplace, or members of different companies
who've been affected by suicide.
So we've developed a policy procedure and protocol for companies that they can implement
within their company so that they can support their employees,
which is a very important piece of our work also.
We also have... we... academically we set up in our University in Dublin, the...
in University College, Dublin we set up a diploma course in suicide studies,
and we've been running that for the last seven years which is...
which is heavily attended, it's a wonderful piece of work.
We have a very good syllabus, and it's great to see so many people signing up for that
programme, completing that diploma, and...
Oh god, I've got three minutes – but anyhow, so...
I'm so sorry, I'm finished now, nearly finished, ok.
So, you know, the academic side, educating people, oh, one very important piece of work
we have again, I'm giving you so much, but because of our work in supporting those bereaved
through suicide, we set up a suicide prevention helpline which is a twenty-four hour service,
and it's staffed again by...
it's different in a sense, it's not a listening service, it's manned by professional counsellors
and therapists for anybody who's at risk of suicide
or concerned about a loved-one who's suicidal.
So the type of people we get are self-harming, the type of people we get calling that line
are people who are at low, moderate or high risk of suicidal ideation, and that service
is extremely busy, especially in Ireland where our economy has fallen flat, you know, I mean
we are in recession at home, the boom is over, and there's lots of families experiencing
great distress because of the economic downturn, with mass unemployment, people are getting
into serious debt, being made redundant, house repossession or fear of it,
the strain that puts on relationships.
And young men, in particular, feel that they've failed their family, they feel worthless,
and so we're getting an awful lot of calls on this twenty-four hour helpline from young
people, young males in particular who are very...
who are victims of our economic downturn and who've often given up on life and they
contact the One Life helpline, so that's a major development.
Console, again, we... Console is a member of the National Implementation Group for the
Irish Government Strategy on Suicide Prevention, and we work closely with the state on the
advisory board for the National Office for Suicide Prevention, so we're very...
you know, we're a national organisation, and it's strange how it's not that long ago when
I went into the Department of Health looking for support for a service like this that...
when I was shown the door, and now we're at the core of, I suppose, exercising change.
You know, and the message we try to get out there is there's help, there's hope, and above
all life is worth living, and, you know, and again that...
you know, it's a strange legacy my sister has left, I wish she was still alive, I wish
she was still here, but that there's an organisation here that's about preventing suicide.
So look, on behalf of everyone in Ireland, on behalf... and I've gone...
I want to thank Professor Annette Beautrais who came to our conference last year and spoke,
did you all justice here in New Zealand, she's highly respected in Ireland, and for her invitation
for me to come here and speak to you today, and I'd like to thank you so much for your time,
and for listening to me. I'm sorry for going over time.
Thank you. Thank you.
[Audience applause]