Or how Ofcom prevents Britons from seeing some suicide prevention information.

I don’t normally write about mental health topics on here. It is not a subject that I have any great amount of specialist skills in, outside of reporting on those whose madness has been a factor in their criminality when I was a court reporter, or encountering those who do have mental health issues in my day to day life. I’m not a professional in the subject of mental health, I am merely a layman who has seen and dealt with people in my everyday life who have suffered from mental health problems. Sadly some of those who I have had dealings with have had mental health conditions that were not cured by today’s psychiatric wonder drugs or talking therapies, and too many of them have eventually ended up having coroners’ reports made about them which contained the words similar to ‘he took his life whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed.’

I decided to write this piece because I’ve been starting to research some of the sites, not criminal ones obviously, but ones that Britain’s national censor and regulator Ofcom, vehemently dislikes, sometimes for ideological or public health reasons. As any reasonably intelligent Briton knows, Britain is not a free speech respecting nation, unlike the USA. In Britain we do not have a First Amendment to our Constitution that guarantees the citizen’s right to freedom of speech, instead Britons have the 1986 Public Order Act, the Malicious Communications Act, the Online Safety Act and the Communications Act, which are are pieces of legislation that too often punish Britons for voicing opinions that the State does not like.

Whilst the majority of us would agree that there’s some stuff that should be banned outright, such as CSE materials and similar, what else might be considered as reasonable to ban from Britons seeing is often much more subjective. One such type of information is that which is to be found on the Sanctioned Suicide website that Ofcom bans Britons from seeing. I started looking at it recently as part of research into what Ofcom bans and why and yes there’s a lot of stuff that gives me the ‘ick’ – such as discussions of suicide methods. I can understand the reasoning of Ofcom for banning this site but I disagree with it. This is because it’s pointless to ban it, anybody determined enough to self delete themselves will not need or even know of this site.

The vast majority of those who I have encountered who have committed suicide did not need an online instruction manual on how to do it. The reasons they did it or attempted it or considered it are unlikely to have been influenced by a website. It wasn’t a website that made an older lady attempt suicide because she could see herself developing the rapid onset dementia that her mother suffered from or the guy who poisoned himself over problems with business failures and the taxman. What propelled them were their own internal and external demons. What’s needed is not to ban people from talking about suicide online but to have a mental health treatment system that isn’t as appallingly awful as that supplied by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). For the record I don’t think that improved mental health services would have saved one of the examples above but it might help others.

But I digress. When I looked at the Sanctioned Suicide website I found what I expected to find which is discussions of suicide methods, about why people are considering suicide, what happens to the people left behind after suicide etc etc. However I also found something via that site in their recovery from suicidal ideation section that I might never have found otherwise, which is in my view thoroughly positive but which Ofcom prevents Britons from reading in the UK because the site is banned in the UK and it uses the unsubtle banhammer of the State to stop people reading it. If I had not had this site drawn to my attention by the Streisand Effect of an Ofcom ban then I would never have discovered a most wonderful piece of information designed to prevent suicide and for people to divert themselves or friends away from it.

That which I found via Sanctioned Suicide is the Emmengard Scale of suicidal ideation. This scale, published I believe by a collective of artists in 2019 following the suicide of one of this group’s circle, whilst not compiled by clinicians, does give the layman a way of gauging whether either themselves or others are at risk of suicide.

Yes I do understand that psychiatrists have issues with the Emmengard scale because not everyone who commits suicide starts off with suicidal ideation with some people just offing themselves without warning or sign. However the Emmengard Scale isn’t for psychiatrists, it’s for the layman to have the information that they need to notice either themselves slipping into dark thoughts or their friends doing the same.

It is I find utterly ironic and a testament to the social value of freedom of speech that a site that Ofcom bans because of its open and sometimes permissive view of suicide also pointed me in the direction of this seriously impressive ground-up attempt to help people with suicidal ideation which is sometimes, but not always, coupled with a person’s existing mental health problems. I would have been unaware of this scale had I not decided to peep into what Ofcom bans Britons from seeing.

The Emmengard Scale was originally published by the Emmengard website (linked below) in cartoon form but here’s the text.

“1. ⁠I am so happy that I will literally go insane if the happiness is sustained for any length of time. 

2. ⁠I am feeling pretty rad. I vaguely recall times I’ve been unhappy but it feels like distant memories now. Things are looking up. 

3. ⁠It is not the best day of my life… I have stuff on my mind, but I don’t think of suicide, except when that one weird friend brings up stupid hypotheticals. 

4. ⁠Suicide doesn’t occur to me except in moments of frustration or stress. It’s like a weird escape hatch my brain has decided to just go to in an attempt to escape stress. It doesn’t feel serious, it’s almost a joke.

 5. ⁠The joke is getting really stale. Suicidal ideation and other intrusive thoughts keep happening, but I am mostly interested in other things. It’s like a low key death affinity.

 6. ⁠I am thinking about suicide a lot. It has become troubling. I can distract myself if I really try, however if an out of control semi was headed towards me, I might not move. I am passively suicidal.

 7. ⁠I cannot stop thinking about suicide, and unfortunately I cannot distract myself. I might be doing more risky things like driving recklessly or drinking to excess. I have graduated from passively suicidal to having a death wish. I need help. 

8. ⁠I am no longer fighting the thoughts, just sort of indulging in them. I sort of want to make the suicide plan, but I am stopping myself. I am holding on, but barely. It isn’t safe for me to be alone. I am suicidal. 

9. ⁠I am actively making a plan to end my life. I am telling people goodbye, settling accounts, and starting to write THE note. I am actively suicidal. I need to tell someone.

 10. ⁠I am actively trying to kill myself. If I do not get medical attention it is very likely I will die.”

In Britain it is well known that mental health services both for adults and young people are utterly dire. If the NHS is generally awful with regards to hospitals and community medicine, then the NHS’s mental health services are even worse. There’s not enough inpatient capacity for those who might become a danger to themselves or others and what facilities there are, if the anecdotal reports I’ve heard are true, are unsafe and appallingly badly run. To access community mental health services so that talking cures and other therapies can be accessed requires a lot of skill and patience to navigate the NHS’s mental health bureaucracy. In other words you have to be relatively together and sane to be able to get anything like the help that is needed and this is why instead of dealing with mental health issues at an earlier stage the NHS is basically a less than perfect crisis management system. With reference to the Emmengard Scale the NHS doesn’t provide non-judgemental or appropriate help at level 4 instead it just tries or too often fails, to pick up the pieces when someone gets to level 10.

The Jewish Talmud famously says that ‘he who saves one life saves the entire world’. When it comes to helping those who might be suffering from or at risk from conditions that might propel them to take their own lives, then it’s clear that Britain’s NHS has on so many occasions failed dismally and failed too often to live up to that Talmudic exhortation and save the lives of those in mental distress.

We cannot rely on the State to do the right and proper things for those in mental distress. The State’s failures in this area are legion and encompass both those who have done terrible crimes because they are mentally ill and were not treated earlier and more appropriately and those for whom personal circumstances and the vicissitudes of life have been a factor in their mental health decline and subsequent suicide. The NHS has failed and continues to fail those with mental health conditions that might be manageable if the service provided had been better and more timely.

Because Britons cannot rely on the State to provide the services that we and previous generations have paid for via our taxes, people need to be more pro-active about helping those in our circles of friends and family who might be at risk of suicide. This is why I believe the Emmengard Scale might be useful to enable people to help both themselves or others before a crisis, maybe a terminal one, occurs. It’s better to take ownership of a problem that might appear in a group of friends or a family and help someone who needs help than leave it to an NHS that has failed us all. When it comes to NHS mental health services it is a case of centralisation being unable to deal with problems that are better left, at least in their early stages, to individuals and their immediate circle. The centralised NHS has failed those with mental health issues and maybe we now need ‘plans by the many not by the few’ as the great pro-free market rap song ‘Fight of the Century’ says in order to help those in distress? It’s possible that widespread community use of the Emmengard Scale in our circles might help people to do that. It might certainly be better than relying on Britain’s collapsing, politicised and generally awful NHS.

Please read the Emmmengard Scale, distribute it, talk about it and look around you and try to work out where your friends or loved ones are on this scale. Use it to help others fight the demons that may lead them to self-deletion. You never know, it might just help someone not take a path that they might have set themselves on. Help yourself, help others and curse Ofcom who might have denied some people the chance to find the Emmengard Scale even though they might find it, as I did, through roundabout and unorthodox ways.

Links

Emmengard Scale

https://emmengard.com/2019/05/07/suicide-scale/

‘Fight of the Century’ song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc&list=RDGTQnarzmTOc&start_radio=1