Editorial: We need to talk about Michael

Opinion

To bury one's own child is an experience no parent should have to endure.

It is a monstrous upending of the natural order of life, by which children stand at their parents' gravesides, not the other way around.

Heather and David Powell know this only too well. But they speak out today in the hope that they might save lives - and spare other parents the suffering as they have felt and continue to feel.

The Waihi Beach couple's world fell apart on the morning of April 19 last year, when the body of their 15-year-old son Michael was found near the family home.

At an inquest in the Waihi District Court this week, Coroner Peter Ryan ruled that Michael's death was self-inflicted.

But the inquest heard chilling evidence that Michael's death followed a late-night exchange of text messages between Michael and two slightly younger girls in which the subject of suicide was raised as was the possibility that one or both girls had died.

What actually prompted Michael to take his own life, no one will ever know, but his mother Heather plausibly speculates that the texts had left him "tormented and confused" thinking that both girls were dead.

To their great credit, the Powells urged the coroner to recommend law changes to guard against a repeat of such a tragedy.

It is entirely understandable that someone bereft by so monstrous a tragedy should want to do anything and everything to stop it happening again.

But it is far from clear that changes to legislation, which already outlaws "threatening, abusive, obscene or hoax" messages, particularly in the small hours, would have much effect.

Young people aged between 15 and 24 are the group most at risk - New Zealand has the second-highest suicide rate of people in that group - and their communication, much of which is conducted by text message, is unlikely to be sensitive to law changes.

What Michael Powell's death does highlight to all parents is that their teenagers' lives in the text-message world are far from free of danger.

The endless thumb-tapping that can so exasperate their elders is, for the most part, an innocent escape that allows them to be always in touch with their friends.

But perils can lurk in these unmediated conversations. As the Waihi coroner remarked, texts can easily be misconstrued when facial expression and tone of voice are not available to lend nuance to what's being said.

The fact that so much of young people's conversations take place by text message imposes an even more urgent duty on parents and other adults with young people in their lives to keep open the channels of face-to-face communication about the worries that can weigh heavily on teenage minds. To put it another way, we all need to talk about suicide.

This is not a universally accepted point of view. Some who work in the suicide prevention would prefer to draw a veil over the subject because they believe that any discussion of suicide puts the idea into heads it would otherwise never enter.

That is not the position adopted by this newspaper, or by the coroner in this case, who was happy for us to undertake the coverage we have.

News media reporting of suicide in this country is subject to strict legal controls - the fact that a death was self-inflicted may not be disclosed unless and until a coroner has returned such a finding and the precise means of death may not be described without the coroner's permission, which will seldom be given.

That is as it should be. The last thing news media seek to do is to provide how-to advice.

But the blight of youth suicide, which is still costing us around 20 per 100,000 of our young people each year, pleads strongly for greater openness so that it becomes normal for youngsters to discuss, with their peers and their elders, the dark thoughts that sometimes consume them.

There are cheering signs of greater openness: former All Black John Kirwan fronted an excellent television campaign about depression and comedian Mike King hosts a Sunday evening talkback show on Radio Live which seeks to bring mental illness into the human mainstream where it belongs.

We salute the willingness of Heather and David Powell to talk about Michael's last night on earth, confident that lives will be saved as a result. Talking about suicide is not a bad thing - unless it's by text message, late at night, when demons can be on the prowl.