public health

God bless America.

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Following the Sandy Hook school shootings in 2012, the Conservative commentator Anne Coulter provocatively proclaimed that “Guns don’t kill people. The mentally ill do.”

“The United States sees an average of 32 000 handgun-related deaths per year (as per this paper published in 2015), and firearms are involved in 68% of homicides, 52% of suicides, 43% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults. Far from the national glare, this everyday violence has a disproportionate impact on lower-income areas and communities of color, and is widely held to be the cause of widespread anxiety disorders and traumatic stress symptoms”… the stigma linked to guns and mental illness is complex, multifaceted, and itself politicized, in as much as the decisions about which crimes US culture diagnoses as “crazy” and which it deems “sane” are driven as much by the politics and racial anxieties of particular cultural moments as by the workings of individual disturbed brains. Beneath seemingly straightforward questions of whether particular assailants meet criteria for particular mental illnesses lay ever-changing categories of race, gender, violence, and, indeed, of diagnosis itself.”

“Persons in the United States live in an era that has seen an unprecedented proliferation of gun rights and gun crimes, and the data we cite show that many gun victims are exposed to violence in ways that are accidental, incidental, relational, or environmental. Yet this expansion has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of the rhetoric through which US culture talks about the role of guns and shootings. Insanity becomes the only politically sane place to discuss gun control. Meanwhile, a host of other narratives, such as displaced male anxiety about demographic change, the mass psychology of needing so many guns in the first place, or the symptoms created by being surrounded by them, remain unspoken.”

“Mass shootings represent national awakenings and moments when seeming political or social adversaries might come together to find common ground, whether guns are allowed, regulated, or banned. Doing so, however, means recognizing that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks, and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect. Ultimately, the ways our society frames these connections reveal as much about our particular cultural politics, biases, and blind spots as it does about the acts of lone, and obviously troubled, individuals.”

Ref: American Journal of Public Health. 2015 February; 105(2): 240-49.

Mental Illness, Mass Shotings and the Politics of American Firearms by Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD

PMCID: PMC4318286

PMID: 25496006

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

Day 820

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One of the French companies worst affected by suicides has been the telecommunications giant, France Télécom/Orange, where 12 employees took their own life in 2008, nineteen in 2009, 27 in 2010 and 11 in 2011. Despite a new agreement on workplace conditions negotiated with the trade unions, there has been a renewal of suicides in recent years with eleven cases in 2013 and ten suicides in 2014.

Suicides took place at a time when the company was restructuring, including a plan to cut 22,000 jobs in three years. Suicidal individuals shared a similar profile: these were typically skilled male engineers or technicians in their fifties who had been forcibly redeployed into low-skilled roles, often in call-centres.

On 17 January 2014, a 42-year old employee dealing with business customers at a France Télécom/Orange office in Paris, threw himself under a suburban train on his way to work. His sister, who is pursuing a claim against the company, contends that her brother had repeatedly complained to his bosses that he was a victim of bullying by his manager. Occupational doctors had also reported a deterioration of working conditions at the agency where he worked, with a rise of workplace stress as a result of company restructuring. Prior to his suicide, the victim had sent e-mails to family members complaining of an unmanageable workload and of constant surveillance and he referred to “humiliation”, “intimidation” and “bullying”. He held several meetings with senior management where he complained of harassment by his manager. Five days before his suicide, he sent an e-mail to his head of service in which he reiterated his request to change teams. These e-mail exchanges are being used as evidence in the investigation by the public authorities into his suicide.

Whilst in France work place suicides are an urgent public health phenomenon, in the UK, despite severe deterioration in working conditions, workplace suicide is not recognised in legislation and there are no specific official mechanisms for data collection. Even when it takes place in the workplace, suicide is presumed to be an individual and voluntary act and according to Health and Safety Executive (2016) legislation: “All deaths to workers and non-workers, with the exception of suicides, must be reported if they arise from a work-related accident.”

(Source: When work kills : http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JPMH-06-2016-0026?mobileUi=0&journalCode=jpmh)