Fear of a Vicious Backlash

The suicide of Robert Enke gets the predictable CiF treatment from Anna Motz:

Last week's suicide of the German goalkeeper Robert Enke revealed more than the terrible news of one man's death, the cruelty of depression and the pressures on sportsmen to protect the public's idealised view of them; it also exposed the ongoing shame and stigma of mental illness. For years he had been struggling with depression, kept secret from the public and his colleagues for fear of a vicious backlash that could, he apparently feared, raise questions about his capacity to care for his adopted baby girl and play for his nation.

Rather than risk this, and perhaps further despairing under the force of these private terrors, he chose the solution of death. That this seemed preferable to risking public awareness of his depression and the imagined consequences of personal shame, family destruction and exclusion from his nation's crucial sporting event, demonstrates something of the huge level of hatred that mental illness still evokes in the public imagination.

There might be some sense in this if we were talking about a physical illness such as Aids, which could perhaps be felt to constitute a kind of stigma. Then - imagine that Enke was gay - it could reasonably be argued that shame, and a macho sporting culture, and the fear of a vicious backlash, might be held to be the most significant factors in the wretched man's suicide.

But he suffered from depression. That he felt unable to talk about his problems isn't so much a damning indictment of a culture which still stigmatises mental illness as part and parcel of what goes with being depressed: you suffer alone, in silence, because you feel worthless and undeserving. Suicide, unfortunately, goes with the territory. He didn't sit back, consider the options, and decide that on the whole death was better than facing the "ongoing shame and stigma of mental illness". Such rational calculations were beyond him. He was depressed. Clinically depressed. He killed himself.

It's possible of course that there could have been a different outcome if he'd talked openly about his problem, but we just don't know.

As for the "huge level of hatred that mental illness still evokes in the public imagination": the 45,000 mourning fans who filled the Hannover 96 stadium, and the estimated 2 million who watched on TV, suggest that - as so often - the public are not quite the brutish prejudiced underclass that CiF contributors like to imagine.

Comments

[william]

I'm not expert but I would have thought that the depression itself was what caused the suicide, rather than a fear that the depression might be made public.