Apology ahead of time – this is a complex issue, and my thoughts on it don’t easily fit in a small post, so this post is LONG. Possibly the longest I’ve ever written. You may disagree with some or all of the below. I don't mind and welcome comments. But please keep it respectful. :) Any comments that get personal, or focus on attacking people rather than addressing the content of the issue will be deleted.
(Possible trigger WARNING. If you are feeling depressed, please reach out! You are not alone. ♥ Lifeline: 131 114. Also, if you have had experience with a loved one committing suicide – you may want to reconsider reading the post below. Take care of yourself. My thoughts and love are with you.)
Right now, across Twitter and in the mainstream press in the UK and elsewhere there is a lot of (I’m sure genuinely felt) disgust, vitriol, outrage, anger, and unhappiness being directed at two young disc jockeys employed at 2Day FM.
These two DJs (on instruction) made a prank call to the hospital that Kate Middleton was staying at pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles wanting to talk to their grand/daughter-in-law. I’ve read the transcript of the prank call and it was pretty stupid and thoughtless.
Okay – right off the cuff, let me be even more specific. I think most prank calls are stupid. They are adolescent and almost never consider the mental state or wellbeing of the people being pranked. They are fun for the people conducting the prank, and perhaps for some listeners, but only in a ‘aren’t I cool’ kind of way. They are insensitive and almost always lack empathy for the people being pranked. They are also wide-spread practice on radio stations around the world and audiences love them.
Having heard the interview with the DJs on ACA last night, I was struck by their naivety and lack of forethought. They were visibly shocked and devastated. But as equally clueless about the possible emotional ramifications for the people they connected with on the other end. They expected to be hung up on. That was it. They thought they were making fools of themselves. They didn’t intend it to be a joke on the nurses. They hadn’t connected the dots on the effect being fooled would have on the nurses.
This lack of empathy and wisdom is in my opinion largely cultural – both for that radio station but also the mainstream media and society as a whole. These DJs are a product of our system.
Does this make it okay – no – but as stupid pranks go this one was as innocuous as they probably get. Put on some silly accents and ring a hospital. Guaranteed that neither DJ expected to get beyond the person who picked up the phone. It wasn’t a personal attack. It wasn’t sustained harassment. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t abusive. It was stupid.
Most people – including Prince Charles – were until last week either laughing about it or calling for the two nurses to lose their jobs. Yes – the biggest outrage being expressed last week was by people calling for these two innocent women who fell for a prank to be disciplined and to lose their jobs. And perhaps the UK rags were also feeling a bit put out that these two ‘colonials’ had gotten information that they hadn’t been able to get yet.
Well may you ask why we should bloody care about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy dramas, but in our celeb-worshipping culture many do. And most of them – outside of the hospital itself - last week were calling for the heads not of the pranksters but of the women who fell for it.
Jump to a week later, and one of those women has apparently committed suicide. (Not confirmed yet by the way – perhaps she took sleeping pills and accidentally overdosed? The autopsy report hasn’t been released yet. We have no idea how she died). So the outrage this week is about the DJs having ‘blood on their hands’… and calling for them to be ‘permanently unemployed’ or ‘jailed’ or ‘shot’ or ‘hung’ or ‘strung up’. People want them humiliated. The faceless jokers who call themselves ‘Anonymous’ have proclaimed themselves judge and jury and judged them guilty of murder.
I understand the outrage. It is a horrible and tragic thing. But the over-the-top reaction makes me feel lost in the face of societal anger, hatred and lack of wisdom.
If this poor woman did commit suicide, we will never fully know why. Did this prank have something to do with it – very probably. Was it the prank itself or the outraged/ incredulous reactions of the hospital or celeb-hypnotised masses that contributed to her stress? I’m going to place my vote with the latter.
But you know – the truth is – this is a complex issue and as much as we want to be able to grasp onto simple explanations and find someone to blame, that simple explanation just doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And no – we can’t have this conversation in 140 characters on Twitter. It takes a lot more words. And a lot more compassion. And a lot more wisdom and thought.
Which brings me to my next point. Suicide.
(If this issue is a personal one for you, I would lovingly suggest you may not want to read further).
[SPACE]
Suicide is a terrible thing. It is – in my compassionate opinion – a tragic act committed by people who are so deep in the bowels of despair and depression that they are not able to fathom the ways in which their act will hurt and devastate the ones they love. I’m not placing blame here by the way – I understand very well the depths of despair that an individual must feel to think they have no other way out. Many even believe that their loved ones will be better off. They are in a seemingly never-ending spiral of despair and unhappiness for which only one end makes sense. It is a terrible place to be in (for some it is clinical) and those people deserve our help and compassion. But that doesn’t change the devastating effect it has on family and friends. It burdens surviving loved ones with an intolerably painful legacy. All of the grief that people feel when losing a loved one is magnified and complicated when a loved one suicides. Most people feel incredibly guilty – could I have helped? Did I miss the signs? How could I not have known? What if? What if?
So yes – let’s talk about suicide. Let’s talk about both the causes of it and the repercussions. Let’s help both those who are feeling suicidal and the families and survivors of people who have committed suicide. Survivors have to deal with oceans of guilt over these very types of issues we’re grappling with here. Mostly they don’t get the easy answers. Suicide is an act of violence on the self that ripples out and hits everyone associated with that person.
But let’s not kid ourselves here – we don’t get a ‘get out of jail free card’ on an issue like this. We don’t get to blame this suicide on two clueless DJs (who cannot have conceivably imagined that this stupid prank would end in this way) and thereby avoid having to talk about all the many cultural and personal contributing factors that would lead to such an act. We bear some collective responsibility for this through our celebrity obsessions, rancid media, cultural shaming and much more besides.
Some questions we could be asking ourselves (that could help us learn and grow from this) but aren’t, include
- How and why do we as a society make it hard for people to admit they’re ‘not coping’?
- Why do we make ‘failure’ and ‘mistakes’ such a big deal?
- What is the nature of ‘shame’ and how do we unravel it?
- Why are we fixated on celebrities and royalty to the extent that this nurse would have felt her life wasn’t worth living simply because she accidentally put through a false call?
- Are our nurses, carers and those in the helping professions sufficiently supported in the very difficult and stressful jobs they face?
- Why are we so hard on each other? So mean? So judgemental? So quick to anger? What are we hiding/ running from/ projecting away onto others? What would happen if we were to face it instead?
- Why does it take a tragedy like this for people’s hearts to be opened? Why do we close our hearts for the most part? How can we support each other to be more compassionate?
- How can we better understand suicidal depression and what can we do to help those suffering from it?
- What can we do to wean ourselves off our societal addiction to drama, negativity, the 24 hour news cycle, and meaningless gossip?
- And yes, should pranks be done away with or at the very least, better regulated? What is the appropriate level of responsibility for radio station who pull pranks?
Questions. So many helpful, useful questions that we could ask.
So – lets blame the DJs instead. Better that than take communal responsibility for our general insensitivity, for our success-obsessed culture which makes failure of any sort shameful, and for our celebrity obsessions. Just last week people were pouring over every detail of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy… juicy, juicy, juicy. Kate Middleton. Royals. Ooo err. Climate change? Whatevs. Royal pregnancy and morning sickness – now there’s a story. New Ideas and Woman’s Days were flying off the shelf. Give us more. Give us more. The prank made us laugh. We re-tweeted the shit out of that sucker. Details of her morning sickness were poured over.
So what are we really horrified over? Are we horrified at the two DJs – really? They pulled a bog-standard prank – the type of prank that is conducted by radio stations the world over. They asked the questions that every media outlet would have given their teeth to get the answers to, to satisfy a hungry horde. If the Daily Mail or the Sun or any of the other sanctimonious British tabloids making money out of leading the ‘outraged’ charge against the Aussie DJs could have gotten access to those answers from Kate’s nurses, they would have printed them in a blind second.
Or are we really horrified instead at our own societal psychopathy – a psychopathy that places importance on unimportant things and then laments when someone falls under the wheels of it. A psychopathy that enjoys the pranks and making fun of people and public humiliation, until something goes horribly wrong. Didn’t many people laugh at this prank last week? Didn’t many think it was a bit of harmless fun? Didn’t it go viral? Don’t many of us eat up that New Idea/ Woman’s Day garbage about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, and how fat Kirstie Alley is now, and whether Rihanna will go back to her abusive ex-boyfriend?
Think about what this hard-working nurse potentially killed herself over. A prank that led to some information being released about some lady’s morning sickness. Is it just me or does this seem shamefully meaningless? Doesn’t it make you want to weep?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that out of everything that could have contributed to this poor woman’s state of mind – the prank call itself was not the worst or even probably the biggest contributing factor. Yes, had it never happened – she could possibly still be here. But here’s another ‘IF’… if we didn’t care as much about royalty or celebrities, if the press didn’t make as big a deal out of the whole thing, if the press hadn’t hounded her, if she personally hadn’t felt humiliated over it and instead had been able to laugh it off, if the hospital had supported them unconditionally and gotten them the emotional support they needed, hell – if the hospital had even put in place the proper and obvious protocols around answering calls to do with the Duchess … if, if, if… she would also possibly still be here.
(You know what IS foreseeable? Prank calls to get information on royal pregnancies.)
If we’re talking contributing factors to scapegoat – there’s a hell of a lot of room there to share the ‘blame’… if blame is the game you want to play with this. And I guess my point here is I don’t think we should.
Let me be even more specific here – someone else, someone who wasn’t Jacintha Saldahna, may not have committed suicide over this. After all – the nurse who gave away the information, and easily made the bigger mistake, has as far as I know not harmed herself as a result. So there was something personal for Jacintha that caused this ‘humiliation’ to feel so extreme and so terrible that she could see no other way out for herself. Her personal head-space and the cultural meaning she associated to the act was as much if not more of a contributing factor to her suicide than anything else. Can we take communal responsibility for that? Should we take communal responsibility for that? A bit. A lot. I don’t have any easy answers. (Also my point).
The two DJs and their radio station ARE guilty – they’re guilty of failure to imagine that the person on the other side of the line has a different emotional reality, set of values, set of stressers, physical preconditions, and whole life going on. But that’s hardly unique. In fact, I’d say it’s at fucking epidemic levels. It is a problem that is wide-spread and largely facilitated, supported and tolerated by the masses. (And being demonstrated so aptly at the moment by the ‘outrage’ brigade).
Where does scapegoating end and communal or even personal responsibility begin? What do we learn by projecting our societal madness onto two people? And what is the logical end-point of seeking to find someone to blame, thereby avoiding the complexity of the issue?
The media collectively shamed this poor woman because we the people think Kate Middleton’s pregnancy is so bloody important in the scheme of things happening in the world today that it was nigh on horrific that her privacy had been breached – and that was a story that would sell. We also possibly humiliated her by going on about how ‘unbelievable’ it was that she fell for it and by shaming her for being so ‘stupid’ and making the mistake. And then when she apparently commits suicide from despair and humiliation (again – not certain, only postulated), we can’t cope with what that says about us as a society – so instead of having the conversation we could be having, we project our collective guilt onto the two people instead. Much easier. And mostly missing the irony of being abusive and horrible to two strangers for something we considered abusive and horrible.
Today a family is grieving and asking themselves ‘what if’ and ‘why’. They may never have the answers. We certainly never will. In the manner of many suicides, we probably won’t ever know what was going on in the mind of someone who felt so at the end of their tether that ending their pain was the only thing they could think about. Beyond family and loved ones. Beyond anything.
Our focus should be on doing whatever it takes to make her family’s journey easier. Not on spewing out even more negativity, hatred and vitriol. Lending the inner blackness of our rampant human and societal egos to an ever dissolving public discourse.
A tragedy happened here. Let’s treat it with the reverence, wisdom and compassion it deserves.
Just a thought.
PS. So much more to say… so much already said. I may also do a blog post some time about the phenomena of projecting personal grief onto a stranger’s death. But that’ll do for now. If you’re after a good read on this issue, Bernard Keane breaks it down well in Crikey:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/
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