Steven Are is fearful of a spike in both suicide and domestic violence as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown. 

Ireland North and South has a massive elephant in the room that people seem wont to ignore.

This pandemic will change the face of human society as we know it, in very real terms unless we achieve the miraculous and invent for the first time a vaccine for a coronavirus we could very well be looking at the 6th Mass Extinction.

The US is listening to a narcissist and trying to reopen, South America, Africa and densely populated South East Asia all have limited healthcare, and this virus is bloody horrendous.

Neither has it gone away you know.

Every economy on the planet has been affected to some degree. Social distancing works only if it continues. But how can any semblance of a normal society be expected to re-establish when the virus has the bastardry of mutation, and worse still the ability to reproduce without causing the host any symptoms at all allowing them to infect unknowingly so many others?

I feel fortunate to be in Australia. This Government despite its many faults recognised the danger and shut down society even before the WHO grew some testicular fortitude in the face of heavy Beijing pressure and called a pandemic. We had heard whispers in December/January that the true number of fatalities was a lot higher than reported.

These whispers we heard came from Doctors who had family in Wuhan. These whispers now say that close to 200,000 deaths happened by late January despite official numbers.

Now is not the time for complacency. Despite stories in the media a vaccine is still very hard to create for a coronavirus due to its pathology, and any vaccine will be useless once, as happened one hundred years ago with the Spanish Flu, it mutates potentially into something far more deadly.

Optimism is good, as is hope, and the gallows humour of the Irish keeps these things going, but it will be the careful man who does not drop his guard while we have no real defence against the unseen force of nature.

Sadly, the virus is not only lethal due to its pathology.

As huge numbers of the population are forced to stay indoors, alcohol consumption has skyrocketed and as a result, domestic violence numbers have increased accordingly.

Another horrific statistic that has been whispered to me by police and paramedics down here is the huge upswing in suicides, particularly by the young, who are feeling the strain more than most. For obvious morale reasons this is not reported in the press.

This demographic are already the lowest paid, and as they are mainly employed in the service industries which have been shut, they are finding themselves in a bleak situation. Unable to pay rent or even buy food. While we all recognize the danger for the elderly this virus takes no prisoners.

The Lancet will be publishing an article on the rise of suicide next month, suggesting a rise of 10k will occur over the duration. I argue this will be optimistically low, given the grim news that filters through friends in the frontline emergency services.

I implore all Quillers to be kind to one another during this time, check on family and friends and look after your own mental health as best you can.

Steven Are is a Belfast quiller living in Australia.

The Grim Harvest

Steven Are is fearful of a spike in both suicide and domestic violence as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown. 

Ireland North and South has a massive elephant in the room that people seem wont to ignore.

This pandemic will change the face of human society as we know it, in very real terms unless we achieve the miraculous and invent for the first time a vaccine for a coronavirus we could very well be looking at the 6th Mass Extinction.

The US is listening to a narcissist and trying to reopen, South America, Africa and densely populated South East Asia all have limited healthcare, and this virus is bloody horrendous.

Neither has it gone away you know.

Every economy on the planet has been affected to some degree. Social distancing works only if it continues. But how can any semblance of a normal society be expected to re-establish when the virus has the bastardry of mutation, and worse still the ability to reproduce without causing the host any symptoms at all allowing them to infect unknowingly so many others?

I feel fortunate to be in Australia. This Government despite its many faults recognised the danger and shut down society even before the WHO grew some testicular fortitude in the face of heavy Beijing pressure and called a pandemic. We had heard whispers in December/January that the true number of fatalities was a lot higher than reported.

These whispers we heard came from Doctors who had family in Wuhan. These whispers now say that close to 200,000 deaths happened by late January despite official numbers.

Now is not the time for complacency. Despite stories in the media a vaccine is still very hard to create for a coronavirus due to its pathology, and any vaccine will be useless once, as happened one hundred years ago with the Spanish Flu, it mutates potentially into something far more deadly.

Optimism is good, as is hope, and the gallows humour of the Irish keeps these things going, but it will be the careful man who does not drop his guard while we have no real defence against the unseen force of nature.

Sadly, the virus is not only lethal due to its pathology.

As huge numbers of the population are forced to stay indoors, alcohol consumption has skyrocketed and as a result, domestic violence numbers have increased accordingly.

Another horrific statistic that has been whispered to me by police and paramedics down here is the huge upswing in suicides, particularly by the young, who are feeling the strain more than most. For obvious morale reasons this is not reported in the press.

This demographic are already the lowest paid, and as they are mainly employed in the service industries which have been shut, they are finding themselves in a bleak situation. Unable to pay rent or even buy food. While we all recognize the danger for the elderly this virus takes no prisoners.

The Lancet will be publishing an article on the rise of suicide next month, suggesting a rise of 10k will occur over the duration. I argue this will be optimistically low, given the grim news that filters through friends in the frontline emergency services.

I implore all Quillers to be kind to one another during this time, check on family and friends and look after your own mental health as best you can.

Steven Are is a Belfast quiller living in Australia.

12 comments:

  1. Steve Ricardos,

    What a great piece, thanks mate. You're absolutely right, we're in for a rough ride with no foreseeable end, and while some folks like me are lucky to have a job as a teacher capable of doing remote learning, others are facing grim prospects. My students are handling the situation with mixed ability. Some are thoroughly depressed while others, many of them introverts, are thriving. Covid-19 continues to be a giant cleaver.

    In a heartwarming bit of irony, my home state of Kentucky is handling the crisis extremely well. Our new governor, Andy Beshear, who defeated the Republican incumbent by a mere 5,000 votes, has like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, established himself as a steady hand. He appears on public television every afternoon at 5:00 pm and calms the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Though we're still dragged down by the evil turtle Mitch McConnell, Kentucky is beginning to walk with a proud new step. We ain't totally ignerint. Again, thanks for the piece, Mr. Ricardos.

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  2. It's not just alcohol that stirs up domestic violence. It's power, frustration and control. It's the lack of imagination in some who see it, to respond appropriately to signs of DV or muted pleas for help. The victim of the abuse watches those on the outside come and go, not wanting to get involved, tacitly accepting, or approving. Or those who want to help but cannot. And it's also the diminished ability of those who suffer domestic violence to conceive of a different reality. A person who is beaten down every day, or some days (who knows how it's going to go today?), or every other day, observes a slow and steady dismantling of their own sense of worth. That sense of worth, an understanding that she/he is a valuable person, was something that started ticking from very early childhood. And it enables a person to see himself or herself as a valid thing in the world: perceiving that you have some worth is intrinsic to your ability to affect things. Put another way, the measure of the self corresponds with one's perception of their own effectiveness.

    I think it's different to learned helplessness (that can contribute, no doubt). Learned helplessness is a product of a system of reward and punishment. Through a cycle of repeated and often random punishings a conscious being settles into a sort of passive mode that seeks nothing.

    A victim of DV might be told that this is really punishment for something they have done, or are. But it's not like they are a participant in a game that goes terribly wrong. The abuser has taken away the victim's status. There's only one valid person here and that's the one with the big mouth, and the fists. (There's discussion about abusers acting from a self-perception of shame, that through violence they can replace their anxiety with an affirming feeling of power or control. Another focus is that the structure of societies necessitates dominators. I don't know why people do this. But I do think they probably don't see all of what they are doing.)

    You stop being a participant when your sense of your own worth has gone. If somebody dominates you through the threat of physical violence or psychological torture, their assessment of the situation, their reality, takes over. This threat is there all the time. It doesn't go away. So somebody else's reality is taking the place of your own. And it's not one that you share. How does this displacement maintain permanence? The mental structures that resist it are dismantled. All these little frontiers and centres of doing that used to make things happen, fade and then they disappear. It's hard to conceive of a different reality, something better, if half your mind is gone and you are in a position of weakness. Maybe for sufferers of DV it's like living in a dark tunnel that seems to be getting narrower... Yet we surprise ourselves with our ability to do things inconceivable.

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  3. Julia
    You've really hit this on the head.

    Alcohol is often only an excuse used as a cover by abusers. Then there are cases where the controller is sober and the victim drinks, partly as an escape from the abuse.

    ' Or those who want to help but cannot.'

    In my experience you can't help because the victim won't allow you to. Do you think that the victim see's those who want to help as just other people who want to control them?

    Why do those who manage to escape from an abusive relationship go into another one?

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  4. All over the world, not just in Ireland, Australia, and the United States, people are trapped in their residences with active alcoholics. As an alcoholic in recovery (23 years now), I have some familiarity with the subject. Though generalizations are always shaky, alcoholics tend to have one thing in common: they are insecure egomaniacs. That paradox explains their all too common combination of grandiosity and fear. Customarily, the active, unrecovered alcoholic, and even the dry drunk, blames others and blames circumstances for their rage and maudlin victimhood. They use resentment as an excuse to stay drunk. In the case of the dry drunk, they stay ornery.

    At this very moment, in every corner of the globe, boozed up alcoholics are currently blaming the novel coronavirus for their damaging verbal and physical abuse. Their families are left to suffer. Many of the victimized family members are codependents, their emotions buckled into a roller coaster ride conducted by the active alcoholic.

    Why do people go from one abusive relationship to another? Well, mostly because that's what they know. The familiar, though painful, is sometimes not as painful to the abused as the fear of change. Escaping patterns of trauma and dysfunction requires support and an incredible amount of courage. For anyone interested, the American author Leslie Jamison has written an excellent book on alcoholism called The Recovering. I've never encountered a writer who dissects the psychology of the alcoholic so acutely. Jamison is remarkable.

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  5. Yes, that is a good description of a certain type of alcoholic, 'insecure egomaniacs'. It would be too much of a generalisation to put them all in this barrel.
    Not all alcoholics are abusive, and there are those abusers who are not alcoholics. Of course some of these could well have become alcoholics if they had taken up drinking.

    Most of the abusers I have come across, and from whom I attempted to help their victims escape, (in some cases successfully) did not have a drink problem. A few were occasional social drinkers and at least two never drank in their lives.




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  6. Thanks to all for the comments.

    There's never an excuse for domestic violence and as Mike points out above not all alcoholics are abusive. I was concerned however when I went to our local supermarket at the start of the pandemic and found that along with toilet paper, the next item to be exhausted was the cheap alcohol. I am lucky in life that I have only encountered two (that I know of) who were alcoholics. One was a complete arsehole even when sober and the other is still a good friend to this day. He's not had a drink in 20 years but even when drinking was affable, his wife stood by him throughout.

    Julia your response probably is worthy of being a piece in it's own right?

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  7. I've a very good friend who was trapped in a DV marriage for years and know only to well the control he had over her, even when they were separating and divorcing the control he had over her...I have listened to her horror stories and how it almost broke her...almost to the point of suicide...

    I have penned a few pieces about elite pedophile rings/networks and I came across a documentary by Dr. Sarah Goode called The Paedophile Next Door , the sad truth is before the bat flu pandemic, more so during and once normality resumes in our lives millions of kids living next door are being raped and sexually abused by the people who are meant to protect them....

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  8. Sadly, all active alcoholics are abusive. Not physically of course, but emotionally. Alcoholism is a family disease, and those who live with alcoholics become codependents. It's part of the pathology. I appreciate all the comments above, but they don't really deal with alcoholism as a disease, a disease that affects many more than the mere drinker. Fortunately, there is AA and there are so many of us who have been lucky enough to walk on the road of recovery, to begin to mature emotionally after stopping at some early age with the crutch and initial warm bath of booze.

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  9. Frankie

    Good on you for helping your friend through those horrors, and thank you too for writing about the elite pedophile rings, for exposing the depravity and sociopathy of those in a position of power thanks to vast wealth or fire power. Kincora Boys Home and the Adams family come to mind. But let's not forget that "charming" aristocrat Lord Louis Mountbatten.

    In an article published on 26 August, 2019, The Irish News reported:

    'The men, who were both 16 at the time, claim they were abused by the earl, an uncle of Prince Philip, according to a report in the Sunday Times. One of them, known as Seán, recalls being driven from Kincora to the earl's castle in Sligo where he was abused by a man. He said he did not recognise him as Lord Mountbatten until he saw a report on the TV news two years later that the earl had been killed. The second interviewee, referred to as Amal, claims to have met Lord Mountbatten four times that summer on day trips from the home in Belfast. He said each encounter lasted about an hour and took place in a suite in an hotel by Mullaghmore harbour. "He was very polite, very nice," Amal is quoted as saying. "I knew he was someone important. He told me he liked dark-skinned people, especially Sri Lankan people as they were very friendly and good-looking." He also claimed that several other boys were brought to Mountbatten on other occasions.'

    Charming indeed.

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  10. Frankie

    I have just watched The Paedophile Next Door and found it an excellent documentary. As Dr Sarah Goode bravely explains paedophilia is of itself not criminal as it means mere sexual attraction to children; it is the acting upon those urges that is criminal and too often this distinction is ignored.

    The documentary is spot on in its dissection of the nefarious agenda of PIE or Paedophile Information Exchange. The abuse at care homes in the London Boroughs of Islington and Lambeth and doubtless many other such institutions were directly down to PIE networking.

    While not discounting evidence of child sex abuse rings at elite levels of society and politics; I feel that it is more impportant to look at the care system where children are still not listened to; the educational sector (especially private or boarding schools) and sports organisations as those are the parts of society most susceptible to targetting by child abuse networks.

    It was appalling that Dr Goode lost her job because of her original and courageous research on paedophilia and Eddie deserves much praise for outing himself so. I hope he is safe.

    Just my thoughts.

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    Replies
    1. Barry,

      Pretty sure Germany had a campaign not long ago to encourage pedophiles to seek help before they committed an offense. From memory they had a good uptake of help they offered.

      Makes much more sense to prevent than to wait til the damage is done.

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  11. Mike Craig

    'In my experience you can't help because the victim won't allow you to. Do you think that the victim see's those who want to help as just other people who want to control them?'

    I think that when someone gets into your head and removes or nullifies the supports you rely on to feel secure, you recognise your own capacity is now limited.

    If you find yourself being attacked you go through your list of defences: call your mother or a friend, leave, fight back, talk to a therapist, achieve at work, become smart, etc. An abuser might respond with threatening behaviour or with mockery that undermines you. If this happens often enough, the victim of abuse comes to understand that those defences weren't really defences at all. The focus of attention shifts to navigating the immediate situation. If somebody is under intimate threat - that is, threats not only to your body but inside your mind, and at home, that seem maybe forever - they become good at interpreting the psychology at play. They have come to understand the parameters: what can I do? what's going to happen then? what can I say? The mind adapts and it creates a little world that supports survival. But the world is limited and marginal. Any capacity to act is also influenced by consideration of the welfare of the abuser, who you sympathise with, whose vulnerabilities you can see, and who you probably even love.

    Someone comes along and they want to help. The perspective of the victim is from inside this little supporting world that has solid boundaries. This is their reality. First in mind: if there's any way to stop this, it is going to mean positioning yourself against your abuser. Then you probably feel guilt. Not only because you are crossing his or her authority, but you are aware of their vulnerabilities and you care. Second, are you scared that somebody on the outside will try to get some control here? Yes. You can't trust someone else to take over: you managed to create this little survival space and you hold it together. Someone else can't fix parts of it because that would compromise its fragile structure.

    I think that in this type of situation, it becomes an all or nothing thing. The victim of DV needs a way to live that is completely different. So it's a creative process. The really tricky part is enabling the mind to conceive of being without intimate threat and of existence that is free.

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