In March 2016, Sinead O’Connor, who died last month at 56 and whose funeral took place on Tuesday in Bray, Ireland, went missing. I remember this specifically because the Daily Telegraph ran a live blog on the singer’s whereabouts after she had posted suicidal thoughts.
I pointed out to an editor at the paper that rolling updates about a person going through a severe mental health episode, an episode that might have ended fatally — and for all they knew, already had — was neither responsible nor compassionate. It was, coincidentally, Mental Health Awareness Week.
On that occasion, O’Connor was found safe, if not well. It was not the only brutal public example of how her mental illness manifested, and mental illness was the term she used. Of contemporary public figures, O’Connor was perhaps the one whose experiences of psychiatric disorder — she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and complex PTSD — spoke most to the realities of those who live with, or endure, the kind of warped brain that can make even the simplest thing feel like a Sphinx’s riddle.
From the confusion of multiple, overlapping diagnoses, to the trial-and-error of medication, O’Connor, both wittingly and unwittingly, elucidated all of it. The chaos and heartbreak during the bad times: the suicidal ideation and attempts; the frothing anger; the sectionable manic insomnia. The making a spectacle of oneself online, the screwing up at work, the lashing out at friends and family ... and then the crushing, paralyzing shame and remorse that follows, as O’Connor’s apology in 2017 for “viciously” insulting family members highlights. She openly grappled with adverse childhood experiences and ruminated on whether a person is created mad or made mad.
Everything that mainstream public discourse around mental health shrinks from, O’Connor put front and center. It was far from the sanitized — often monetized — Instagram version, which, unfathomably, verges on the aspirational. The way people responded to O’Connor’s most vulnerable moments undermined our ostensibly enlightened, destigmatized epoch. When O’Connor uploaded a rambling, distressed 12-minute video to Facebook in 2017, there were just as many Twitter jokes and memes as concerned comments. Here was the raw reality of someone in the midst of crisis, and the response was, in large part, mirth or disgust. Afterwards, O’Connor spent time in hospital, which she would do frequently, describing the private St Patrick’s University Hospital in Dublin as a sort of second home and dedicated her memoir to its staff.
O’Connor said the “millions of people” with mental illness made her feel less alone, but she noted that not everyone “has the resources I have.” Mental health services have been decimated in both the UK and Ireland. In England, the number of beds has been slashed by 25 percent since 2010. In Ireland, pediatric admissions have fallen by 40 percent in a year due to lack of staff. The statistics are endless in their deathliness.
A few days after O’Connor died, a man relayed to the Irish Independent an encounter he had with the singer. She had comforted him in the car park of St Patrick’s, where his son was receiving treatment.
“I’m concerned that if we hadn’t had private healthcare, my son might not have made it,” he said.
Last year, O’Connor’s son Shane reportedly absconded from suicide watch at the Tallaght hospital, a state-run facility in Dublin. He ended his life, aged 17.
O’Connor was shattered by her son’s death, as any parent would be. Add unbearable grief to the mix. Furthermore, her fame was another factor. While O’Connor was right in her observation that mental illness does not discriminate, she nevertheless said “it didn’t really help in terms of being well or a stable person ... that I was getting kicked around by the media for years.” After O’Connor’s death, Lily Allen, who has been relentlessly hounded by the tabloid press, alluded to the profound effect this has.
In her unmitigated candor, O’Connor made a difference to genuine mental health awareness, or rather, awareness of mental illness. But it wasn’t just her words. After the death of her son, she called for system reform and an inquiry, so that others might be spared the same agony. A decade ago she launched a mental health programme in County Kerry. She quietly paid for strangers’ counselling.
I don’t know how O’Connor died, but as well as her incredible music, her wit, verve, strength and her activism, she leaves a legacy of representation for those of us who know what it is like to have their headphones confiscated in the inpatient wards, who know what it is like to look in the mirror and see something not quite human. Not the hashtags or the reels or the self-diagnosis of ADHD after leaving dishes in the sink for two days (try weeks, try months); not the mantras written on a Post-it that are somehow supposed to assuage hours of daily skin-picking or a two-year waiting list.
O’Connor was a truth-teller. Perhaps her most visceral truth of all was how she showed us her suffering and how she was desperate for it not to be in vain.
The gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) by US President Donald Trump’s administration poses a serious threat to the global voice of freedom, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes such as China. The US — hailed as the model of liberal democracy — has the moral responsibility to uphold the values it champions. In undermining these institutions, the US risks diminishing its “soft power,” a pivotal pillar of its global influence. VOA Tibetan and RFA Tibetan played an enormous role in promoting the strong image of the US in and outside Tibet. On VOA Tibetan,
Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑), the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-cheng (李坤城), caused a national outrage and drew diplomatic condemnation on Tuesday after he arrived at the New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office dressed in a Nazi uniform. Sung performed a Nazi salute and carried a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as he arrived to be questioned over allegations of signature forgery in the recall petition. The KMT’s response to the incident has shown a striking lack of contrition and decency. Rather than apologizing and distancing itself from Sung’s actions,
US President Trump weighed into the state of America’s semiconductor manufacturing when he declared, “They [Taiwan] stole it from us. They took it from us, and I don’t blame them. I give them credit.” At a prior White House event President Trump hosted TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家), head of the world’s largest and most advanced chip manufacturer, to announce a commitment to invest US$100 billion in America. The president then shifted his previously critical rhetoric on Taiwan and put off tariffs on its chips. Now we learn that the Trump Administration is conducting a “trade investigation” on semiconductors which
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
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