Confronting suicide: First step to recovery is the hardest

EVEN in the hardest days, there can often be a ray of light, a sliver of hope or warm humanity that, even if it can’t immediately lift the darkest clouds, points to the grace and love that brings out the very best in all of us.

This week, Helen O’Driscoll, speaking in Charleville after the inquest into the deaths of her twin nine-year-old sons Paddy and Thomas, who were stabbed more than 40 times each by their depressed older brother Jonathan, who later took his own life, epitomised that grace and courage. She used the opportunity afforded by her family’s great tragedy to speak beyond it, to try to reach out to others who might be suffering life-defining and life-threatening depression in silence.

Mrs O’Driscoll reached over what must be all but incomprehensible and barely endurable for herself, her husband, her surviving children, and wider family to try to convince those suffering, as her troubled son Jonathon, 21, suffered, that they need not feel so alone or cornered and that there are a range of services or individuals only too willing to help them in their moment of great need.