Dialogue: Sometimes talk is the problem rather than the solution

I am in a little Devonport depot that is about to hold an exhibition of artworks by people from all walks of life who have been touched in some way by suicide.

I am thinking an anti-social thought here in my corner: I am wondering if this sort of event is a good thing.

I am keeping this thought strictly to myself, though, because on the face of it this event IS a good thing. (I do want to make that point before I get stuck in.) It is a very good thing.

It is a very rare thing, on account of the fact that it's an example of action rather than rhetoric. It is a sort of community forum. Anyone who wants to bring along an artwork by or about a loved one who has committed suicide is welcome to do so.

"Our aim is to bring [suicide] out into the open and allow a space where people can freely express how they feel about it," depot co-cooordinator Stuart McEwen tells me.

That large numbers of people are seeking such a space is not a point for debate.

Even before the event opened, the place was a magnet for people who'd lost someone to suicide. An hour was all I needed to get a feel for the number of people out there who have had this horrible experience and are forever doomed to try to understand it.

Everyone there had lost someone; everyone there was doing their best to make sense of it through, I guess, whatever art form seemed most likely to divulge tangible answers.

One woman, for instance, had a beautiful photo-collage that her father had made of her brother after the brother died. It was an enormous archive that she was, even now, examining in chronological order for clues to his decline.

The main point: she liked the fact that events such as this allowed her to discuss the situation out in the open. She (like most people) felt the solution lay in "breaking down taboos" (quote from one of the organisers), in collectively taking a nice, deep breath and looking a difficult situation in the eye. You can hardly blame people in that position for taking that line; still, there's something about these events that doesn't sit so well with me.

I know what it is, too. It's the blind, contemporary belief that a problem can be solved if it is talked about for long enough and in enough detail (people my age will remember that whole generations tuned faithfully into Oprah on that very understanding).

No - it's more than that. It's this belief that one can create a gentler world if one engages in enough honest, ongoing, open and highly emotional analysis.

It's all based on the admirable but largely romantic notion that it's possible to talk the world into being a nicer place. It steadily ignores the fact that the world can be talked into nothing of the kind, and that people ought to be prepared for it.

I'd rather we erred on the side of caution. There are times when I wonder if this tendency towards too-lengthy analysis of one's own emotional state isn't a large part of the problem when it comes to suicide rates.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to teach our kids to toughen up a little.

Julie Burchill recently touched on this subject in one of her fantastically offensive Guardian columns. It was so offensive that most people I sent it to took a few days to get over it. Still, once you rallied, it was hard not to concede that she had a point.

Suicide, said Burchill, was a "side-effect of peace and affluence," the ultimate resource of generations that think about themselves far too much and in far too much detail, have never learned gratitude, like to manipulate by playing the victim, don't know that they are born, and so on.

"You didn't get many suicides in Jarrow in the 30s," observed Burchill.

It was a horrible article, but it did offer food for thought - at least, if you managed not to choke on it.

So, is suicide - particularly in the middle classes - a symptom of nations and generations that are terminally indulged?