Public Role In Suicide

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32037, 11 July 1969, Page 1

Public Role In Suicide

Should the community interfere if a person decides to take his own life? Always, says Dr I. Pilowsky, senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Sydney, who is here to talk to a suicide seminar in Christchurch on Saturday.

“We must always assume that there are other options,” he said. “The point of trying to stop people from committing suicide is that you’ll never know if they should or they shouldn’t or what could be done about the situation if they’re dead. “We know from talking to those who don’t succeed that most of them, at the time of their attempt, were very muddled. They .have not made a rational decision. “What I am struck by is that the survivors when they look back are usually very pleased that they didn’t succeed. By then they can see that there are other options,” he said.

Dr Pilowsky is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, and studied in England

for seven years under Professor Erwin Stengel, a world authority on suicide. The seminar at which Dr Pilowsky will speak has been arranged by the Canterbury Association for Mental Health and the Life-Line counselling organisation. It will be attended by teaching, legal, medical, psychological, social workers, nursing and religious representatives and is intended to give them the knowledge needed to recognise and help suicidal persons. Dr Pilowsky said that one of the big problems in the prevention of suicide was the commonly held belief that those who threatened to com-

mit suicide would not do so. “This is quite wrong,” he said. "If someone talks in terms of hopelessness about life, we must take him seriously. If we can help him sort out his problems he will be less likely to make an attempt on his own life.” Dr Pilowsky said that many persons who killed themselves had given warnings beforehand—they had given hints of their intentions. “We’ve got to take such warnings seriously,” he said. “It is particularly important that those in the caring professions—doctors, lawyers, clergymen—be on the lookout.”