Another day, another body found after a man fell from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the early hours of today. I know it doesn’t really happen every day, but it happens often enough and the reason is usually the same: mental illness.
I am no spring chicken in the age department and I have usually lived in the real world where some awful things can happen. I shall not repeat exact stories because there always remains the possibility that someone who has been left behind following a suicide may recognise their loved one. However, the number of people I have known who have taken their own lives is well into double figures. Some of these people were young at the same time I was young, others not so young. On every occasion we all wondered how we had missed the signs that must have been there. Or maybe they weren’t there at all, effectively blocked out to the entire world. Depressed people can do that. Many of them don’t want to let on. We might see them as weak. You know how it is.
And then, to my great surprised, along comes a royal, Prince Harry, a royal I actually like and admire. Despite all my qualifications about the royal family – I lean, with little passion it must be said, to abolition – there is something about the lad that I like. Today he was talking about mental health and when he talks, I tend to listen.
The other day he had a very public AIDS test. It was symbolic, yes, but it was also very powerful. He was doing what his late mother did when she did all her work with people with AIDS. My harder line abolitionist friends might not like me saying this, but her work changed the world, it really did. She challenged and changed attitudes. It was her greatest legacy, other than her children.
Speaking at a BBC event for the Heads Together Harry set up with Prince William, he showed how much he suffered after his mother’s death. “You know, I really regret not ever talking about it,” he said to Rio Ferdinand, whose wife and the mother of this three children died of cancer last year.
Athletes Dame Kelly Holmes and Iwan Thomas were present too and talked, very bravely in my opinion, about their own battles with depression. “Everyone can suffer from mental health issues,” said Harry. So why does it matter that Harry and others speak out?
Mainly because millions of other people, without the fame of royalty and sport, suffer silently, their lives utterly ruined by mental illness. But don’t compare Joe Bloggs on Civvy Street with rich, famous people by way of their income or lifestyle: comparisons don’t matter in that sense. Yes, it is possible that the rich and famous can buy their way to better medical treatment and that, sadly, disgracefully, actually, is the way of the world but by bringing the subject to everyone’s attention and by putting pressure on the people who hold the pursestrings – politicians – Prince Harry has done us an enormous act of kindness.
We do not know the reasons why another man has fallen to his death from the Suspension Bridge but as there are no suspicious circumstances we probably have an idea. Mental health is still the Cinderella service in the NHS, regarded as rather less important than physical health. If the grandsons of the Queen are now on board the campaign to address our country’s criminal attitude to mental illness, perhaps it will become unstoppable and one day there will be no more tragic suicides on the rocks below Brunel’s famous bridge.
