Save us from Charlotte Dawson's newly-grafted-on supporters

I had a dream in which I returned to Earth, and when I came back from space I was talking about what it was like but there was someone else, a writer, who produced a written description of what it was like to return to Earth. I read the description and then started talking, telling the writer how my version of returning to Earth differed from what was written. But the writer's words were read by many people while I was limited to speaking words quietly in a room, and the written description of what it was like to return to Earth was strong, although it differed in many material aspects to my version, which was based on experience. When I woke up it was 2.30am so I had a drink of water and went back to bed but a mosquito came out of the darkness, and so here I am writing.

My dream reminded me of something that happened yesterday when there was outrage on social media about an article written by a person called Deborah Hill Cone, in New Zealand, about the death of Charlotte Dawson. In the article, Cone suggests that Dawson suicided because of the ravages of age, and she said some things that are quite accurate, for example:

It is hard being 47. At the crisis of middle age, losing your sexual currency, becoming invisible. Psychologist Joseph Burgo says getting older inevitably involves a kind of narcissistic injury: as our bodies age and younger people find us less physically attractive, they seem to look right through us, as if we no longer exist.

Now I don't know how old Cone is but going by her newspaper dinkus she must be 35 if she's a day. I doubt that she lives with depression, but then again I doubt that the majority of the people who were wheezing with pompous outrage on Twitter have a clue what is involved in mental illness, from a first-person perspective. The truth is that a suggestion such as Cone's is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you if you live with mental illness; the hard realities of psychosis, for example, likely put far greater demands on your patience than any media columnist could produce, and so it seemed comical to me to read all the statements of regret and hatred, directed against Cone and in favour of Dawson. More than merely comical: it seemed ludicrous. As if the worst thing that could happen is that a few progressive opinion-makers in Australia might have their worldview challenged in the matter of someone else's suicide. Poor dears.

The fact is that as you age you do become invisible, and for someone involved in the image industry, as Dawson was, that must be challenging. There was surgery to help improve the image. As far as I know - for I am not a woman and I don't work in TV - Cone might be right, and Dawson found ageing too much to cope with, but I doubt it. I think that her depression was triggered by something else - a TV program featuring her ex-husband was mentioned - and she buckled in advance of public comments from anonymous trolls, those whose words she had unwisely heeded in the past. Dawson's mistake was to give a shit what other people - people too cowardly to come out from behind the convenient screen social media makes available - had thought and said.

For us the mistake is to sentimentalise her death. Her life, after all, was her own to end. We no longer say "commit suicide" because no longer is there the moral opprobrium attached to the act, as there was for millennia, when the opinion of the Church - that suicide was a mortal sin - meant different treatment for the remains of suicides, than for people who died by less violent means. Attempted-suicides were treated as criminals. If Dawson wanted to kill herself she had every right to do so, and it's nobody's business except hers.

The language we use to talk about suicide is filled with euphemisms, metaphors, allusions and other rhetorical tropes - Cone accurately points to the in truth annoying "demons", for example; a word that peppers talk of suicide in the media and on social media - because we are trying to deal with something that is alien to us and so we seek to find ways to make it conform to our view of the world. There is also a thick coating of sentiment used by people with no connection to the subject who think that by saying these things they are honouring a memory they never had except within the flickering simulacra of mediated culture. No wonder Cone got stroppy. Because that's what her article is, in the end. It's not addressed to Dawson herself but, rather, it's aimed at the legions of newly-minted Dawson groupies who emerged in the wake of her suicide to overlay public debate with their confected feelings of sadness, or whatever it was they felt. Probably not much actually.

So I sympathise with Cone - as I return to Earth and ready myself to tell people, in written words, what it felt like - because like her I cannot stand falseness and fatuousness, routine expressions, and bland moral outrage. In the face of the despair that someone with a mental illness faces - on their journey in space, outside the comfortable confines of Earth's sweet atmosphere - the chatter of the public looks to me something like the isolated specks of the unblinking stars that are embedded in the immeasurable blackness of the mortal universe.