April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
~T.S. Eliot

Studies claim that 90% of suicides are the result of mental illness and further, that depression is a mental illness. This is misleading. Psychologists love to apply labels and categorise people. However the percentage of suicides related to actual mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder etc) is far lower than we are commonly lead to believe. A blanket classification of depression as a mental disorder is inaccurate since the distinction is not made between clinical and reactionary depressions.

While clinical depression and chemical imbalances are classed as mental disorders, depression over the recent loss of employment or a loved one is hardly a mental illness. It’s a temporary emotional state.

Another myth is that once a person is suicidal, they will remain so. The reality is that in many cases, especially when the attempt stems from reactionary depression, once the

crisis has passed, the healing begins and the individual moves forward with their life. Roughly only 10% of people who attempt suicide will make another attempt or eventually take their own life.

The most common misconception about suicide is that the rates are higher during the winter. This myth is reinforced by media coverage. Sad stories and melodrama make good copy but do little for the truth. Statistically, while depression is at its highest, suicide rates are actually at their lowest during the month of December since the holiday season generally finds people in more frequent contact with family and friends and this provides a them with a support network.

Sadly, suicide is at it’s highest during the spring. In the season considered to be one of hope, of renewal and rebirth, that is when most people choose to die. The belief is that the season is perceived as a broken promise, the hope the suicidal person sees everywhere around them doesn’t touch their own life. For them, nothing has changed and the promise of hope turns to hopelessness.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
~Arthur Schopenhauer

“Thou shalt not kill.”

One of Christianity’s Ten Commandments and a moral law that has been similarly found in many other, often older, faiths and cultures. It’s assumed it was made in reference to the killing of others but in the 4th Century AD, Saint Augustine determined that suicide was an “unrepentable sin”. His argument was that since the 5th Commandment omitted the phrase “thy neighbour”, killing oneself was prohibited even though no passage in the Bible specifically forbade suicide. In the 13th Century AD, Saint Thomas Aquinas defended the prohibition in the belief that our bodies are essentially “on loan” to us from God and that suicide is an affront to Him as life is His gift to us. The result of this was that in the Middle Ages, the bodies of those who committed