A musician’s plan to raise awareness of suicide prevention.

Three years ago my godson Alex took his own life, aged 24. He was a wonderful young man who had so much to give and so much still to experience. Along with all his friends and family I was left wondering what I could have done to help prevent his death. I started to read about suicide and was shocked at the statistics; suicide is the biggest cause of death for people aged 15-45 and accounts for twice the number of deaths as road accidents. Deaths by suicide have reached a ten-year peak; this equates to almost 7 deaths by suicide every day in Australia, and it is estimated that for every completed suicide as many as 30 people attempt. These are our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, people from literally all walks of life. So many lives are wasted. I realised we need to start talking about suicide much more openly, and learn how to better support those at risk.

Concert for Life from ∑ ∞ on Vimeo.

I hatched a plan. September 10, 2015 is World Suicide Prevention Day so I decided to organise a concert on this day to help raise awareness of the issue and raise as much money as we could for suicide prevention.

Musicians from the Sydney Symphony and the Australian Chamber Orchestra will be coming together to perform Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Mozart’s Oboe Concerto with the wonderful Diana Doherty as soloist in Sydney’s best concert hall acoustic – the Town Hall. There will also be some beautiful projections on the mighty Town Hall organ during the concert, provided by The Electric Canvas, one of the creative teams behind Vivid Sydney.

I have been overwhelmed by the number of people, both musicians and those working behind the scenes on this project, who have told me about family and friends they have lost through suicide. Colleagues I have worked with for years who told me that their father or brother took their own life, strangers who have offered to volunteer who told me that their sister or husband ended their own life through suicide. The experience is a common one but often, it seems, kept behind closed doors.

Maybe one reason for this is that suicide was actually a criminal offence until about fifty years ago. That’s why we still say “committed suicide”, though we clearly need nowadays to find a less loaded phrase. Something of the taboo remains, and while we are finally starting to acknowledge that mental illness is as real and as treatable as physical illness, there is a long way to go.

There are plenty of musicians who have suffered mental illness of course. Perhaps the most famous is Robert Schumann who narrowly survived throwing himself in the Rhine, only to end his life locked away in an asylum as his wife Clara destroyed his final works which she dismissed as the works of a madman. But what about Beethoven, who as a 32 year old contemplated suicide, driven to despair by his deafness? He detailed these suicidal feelings in the moving Heiligenstadt Testament: “I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. So I endured this wretched existence…”

It’s a sobering thought that if Beethoven hadn’t found the strength to go on we would only have two Beethoven symphonies, a handful of other works, and certainly not the sublime and life-affirming Sixth Symphony that will feature in Concert for Life.

I hope people will come to the concert to stand together against suicide, and to enjoy a very special night of music making as well.

All profits from the concert will go to Suicide Prevention Australia and Lifeline Australia to be spent on much needed research and education programs.

Concert for Life is at Sydney Town Hall on Thursday September 10 at 7.30pm

Tickets