Gently gone

A few months ago I had gotten hitched to a BBC program Inspector George Gently, about the fictitious North East Police Constabulary, starring Martin Shaw as the Chief Inspector and Lee Ingleby as Detective Inspector John Bacchus. This series had started in Britain in 2007, and was based on 46 Inspector Gently novels written by Alan Hunter.

The story started in 1964 and continued until 1970. The end of series 7, the end of the show, was filmed in 2015 and showed here on ABC last weekend. They had introduced this program by saying: "Gently's enemies from his London Met days are coming after him. He finds himself suspended from duty - powerless, unprotected and persecuted. He must confront his deepest fears and fight to the death." I think I cried at the end of this program.

Many years ago I had grown up with a program called M*A*S*H. This had started in 1972 and ran until 1983. Set up as the team who worked in the military hospital during the Korean war, it was based on tales told by real MASH surgeons. The production team had interviewed these people before the show started, and it was made as an "allegory", which was described on Wikipaedia as "illustrat[ing] complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners."  It appears on many channels as reruns. I had cried for the final show back in 1983.

What have either of these programs done for me? I think they had convinced me that their fictitious tales were far too close to reality. They represented real life. For me, "real life" is the actuality that is happening in my own life and in the lives for everyone else, but people are living further apart. Technology is separating people. Science is drawing people apart. So is religion. And wealth and poverty are separating people even further.

History seems short. Sixty years ago, whilst western countries worked to recover from the extremely heart-breaking WW2, life seemed good. The awareness of "rich" people didn't take over our neighbourhood, or result in the poverty we now see from the mid 1800s to early 1900s. We were born, we played, we had great friends. We survived. But this is different now.

The research team at the Griffith University in the write-up before their 2015-2017 research said "[t]here is increasing concern about the number of suicide deaths in Australian farmers" and that in Australia "the rates for children younger than 15 years is estimated to have increased by 92% between the 1960s to 1990s." The team have provided a bi-annual research pdf file, but these would not be read by most people.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare provided a pdf in 2009, titled A review of suicide statistics in Australia and looked at numbers, trends and methods, and added: "...data presented in this chapter are broadly consistent with the occurrence of a recent increase in under-enumeration of ISH deaths."

Mindframe, which says they are a "media initiative", last year (2015) provided a pdf with suicide figures. The graph for 2012 shows a remarkable increase for elderly (85+) men, but there is no information other than age and year in these graphs in their file.

Very few reports or articles looked at why anyone would kill themselves, except Wikipaedia said that "[s]tudies suggest that in men there is a high correlation between the number of suicides and the length of unemployment accompanied by a decrease in the national unemployment rates. The data also states that the longer the period of low employment the higher the rate of suicides in the age group of men between ages 25–34 and 55-64." I think this might also affect women.

Right now I wonder how am I feeling. Was this after Inspector George Gently was shot by enemies? Would I have seen that as me being dumped (shot) by my ex-employer? Am I "fighting to the death"? Or was it many years ago, back to the end of M*A*S*H, when I saw it as a reflection of reality and mine is down there? Depression can lead to suicide**. Where is it leading me?

Gently is gone.


** If you feel like your depression is dragging you down, please ring Lifeline Australia, 13 11 14.