Bedlam at Botany Bay by James Dunk

Author:James Dunk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244556
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

THE EDITORS OF THE MONITOR AND THE AUSTRALIAN SAW more than imitation in the spate of suicides in 1827–31. This self-destruction, and the madness bound up in it, were easy to account for. These were Darling’s suicides. He had become ‘a scourge and a nuisance’ to the colonists, The Australian declared, and at his departure they ‘testified their extreme joy, by bonfires, illuminations, fetes, and fire-works; and their contempt and hatred, by burning and hanging him in effigy all over the town!!!’117

The Gazette described suicide as a ‘horrid mania’ looking to break out like an epidemic. Suicide is traditionally not seen as a collective madness, however, but as a private act. It reflects despair and, perhaps, a kind of insanity. Indeed, being a danger to oneself, like presenting danger to others, was a key indicator of insanity and rationale for institutionalisation. A 1924 Lancet report warned that it was crucial not to neglect early signs of mental illness, which had been discovered in two-thirds of the suicides documented in a Royal Commission.118 A late 20th-century survey found that more than 90 per cent of suicides studied were either diagnosed with psychiatric disorders before their death, or could be afterwards without controversy.119 Madness and suicide are intricately related; suicide is one jagged edge of madness; a point of no return which community, medicine and state were responsible for guarding.

But if families, doctors, and judges are tasked with preventing suicide directly, others have taken up suicide as the expression of some social disturbance, an indication of a different kind of problem on a different order of magnitude. The 1924 Lancet study linked suicide to unemployment, family breakdown, war and social disruption. This perspective is heir to the work of Emile Durkheim, who argued in the late 19th century that psychology did not have the best instruments for understanding a complex societal problem like suicide. He developed social scientific methods to show that suicide, which seemed so private, in fact conformed to social patterns, and therefore could be analysed and learned from at the level of the social body.120

By the early 20th century, the connection between suicide and insanity was prevalent. English coroners objected to the conflation of insanity and suicide, and to the legal framework which bound them to pronounce the deceased as either felo de se, literally ‘felon of one’s self ’, or non compos mentis, or not of sound mind. Juries felt pressured to return verdicts of temporary insanity where there was no indication of it.121 A quarter century later coroners argued that there should be no obligatory inquiry into state of mind in cases of suicide, and no reference to it in the verdict.122

English coroners applied law in an ‘inchoate’ fashion, writes R. A. Houston, compared with the other courts; the regular resort to insanity to explain suicide is one example.123 In criminal cases, temporary insanity is used to allow consideration of more diverse evidence than the law typically allows. It makes room around doctrine and precedent, argues Russell Covey, for juries’ ‘intuitive, or commonsense, assessments of culpability’.

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