Thread by @martinmckee

🧵1/9 Finally caught up with last night's #moralmaze om @BBCRadio4 on suicide. My colleague @waterssarah56 was a witness following our paper on Ofsted - a few observations
bmj.com/content/381/bm…

2/9 Panellists kept focussing on lack of a single cause for an individual suicide as reason not to investigate deaths - totally misses the point, which is to find patterns. That's what epidemiologists do

3/9 Even if we don't know all the reasons why a particular person killed themselves, we do know that there are underlying factors - like economic cycles & job losses - and they vary over time
bmj.com/content/345/bm…

4/9 We also know that there are things we can do to prevent many of these suicides - eg spending on active labour market programs - basically governments saying "we care"
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19589588/

5/9 But if we don't investigate conditions at work in all suicides where a link is suggested, how will we know? @waterssarah56 & I have been asking for years
emerald.com/insight/conten…

6/9 And Sarah has shown how French authorities do find work-related patterns and act on them
waterstones.com/book/suicide-v…

7/9 But the really worrying bit was where panellists invoked the "it's complex" argument - classic tactic used to shut down argument. As @spidermaani showed, used lots by tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, & many other industries
jech.bmj.com/content/71/11/…

8/9 Panellists also talk about "weaponising" suicides - but all we are asking for is that they are investigated - so why so much opposition to doing so? @doctor_oxford & I asked the same re junior doctors in 2017
bmj.com/content/357/bm…

9/9 And for avoidance of doubt, despite hints that our paper may have been some sort of campaign against Ofsted, we've never written about it before, we're not part of any campaign, but we've both written lots on suicides and their causes, so we have a legitimate interest