The news that Darlinghurst’s Green Park Hotel will close after 127 years of continuous operation echoed round the country when it was announced a few days ago.
This was for the usual reasons: journalists’ watering holes are always made more of a fuss of than other folks’ pubs, and the Green Park has been that over many decades — as well as a gathering place for crims, bohemians, the Push and latterly the LGBTIQ community and its predecessors.
But what makes its passing so notable is that it’s not being killed for apartments, but by a deal between its mega-landlord owners and St Vincent’s Hospital as part of its endless expansion into the neighbourhood.
This rich focus of community, history, continuity, meaning will be replaced by a suicide prevention centre. And thereby hangs a tale of modernity: the conjunction of capital and discursive power, and the war of institutions against life.
The deal between Solotel and St Vincent’s was done on the quiet and suddenly announced. The vendors don’t give a damn about the pub’s continuity; St Vincent’s doesn’t seem to have considered the social case for not taking the pub out of commission.
Indeed one doctor celebrated its demise, noting that it would now be a place that “treated” people without alcohol, as if that was all a pub was.
And that is a very revealing remark about the mindset of the “prevention” industry — that it can see no difference between a pub, where life intersects and happens at multiple levels, and a bureaucratic/therapeutic institution grounded on a power relationship where people are assigned the roles of doctors and citizens, rather than equals.
The notion that destroying a celebrated pub to create a clinic is a like-for-like exchange is the sort of thing someone in the ’50s would have put in a sci-fi dystopia.
Now it’s here, courtesy of the prevention and treatment industry. More particularly, courtesy of the treatment industry’s massive ability to self-reproduce the vast energy it expends on doing so.
In the three fields that consume enormous resources — alcohol and drug abuse, suicide prevention, and violence against women — there is little evidence that these generic programs make much difference, and some possibility that they may make things worse due to the complex interplay of selfhood, power and “voice” in social life.
One possibility is that the relentlessness of such discourses produce a “suicidal subject”, an identity for someone to slot into. That would certainly explain the paradoxical course of LGBTIQ status and suicidality over several decades since the ’70s.
To try to get St Vincent’s to rethink its imperatives would be to howl in the wind. The same with Black Dog, Beyond Blue, various cancer prevention groups, or any number of powerful orgs. Big prevention rolls on, its leading figures interpreting its self-perpetuation as therapeutic success.
The sector is filled with people who have an appetite for micropower over others, and who have no interest in genuinely reflecting as to whether they are doing more bad than good. The finding that after the untold millions spent on prevention in Australia suicide rates have returned to a long-term mean will make no difference to them at all.
The hospitals’ institutional drive has long transformed from service to institutional growth. Not even for profit; simply for power, a nihilism masked by a residual ethic of concern.
Were a pub with a strong LGBTIQ presence to be replaced by a Hungry Jack’s the uproar would be instant, even if the spatial concentration of LGBTIQ people has diminished somewhat. But who’s going to object to the expansion of a hospital?
Well, people should. Raise hell. In 20 years this form of therapeutic prevention will join psychiatry’s long and dishonourable history of fad approaches — lobotomy, refrigerator mothers, behavioural reconditioning — in the museum.
In the meantime note this: the hospitals and the state defined homosexuality as a crime and disease until 1974, and closed down its gathering places. Now they define it as a vulnerability to be protected — and close down its gathering places.
The one continuity is the institutions’ war on life. This is the war we’re all in: to try to keep some area of life — raw, risky, joyful, surprising, unpredictable — protected from the intersection of capital and discursive control that is emerging as the new order.
To have cities that are something other than a giant dormitory/hospital/mall agglomeration. The “small” matters such as the killing of a pub aren’t small at all; they’re where life happens, and where the fight has to be had.
If something like this, or the attempt to put an Apple store in Melbourne’s Fed Square, or any number of other matters, makes you feel a particular sense of dismay, a keen sense of loss and destruction, it’s worth listening to that emotion and acting on it politically.
The Green Park can be saved as a pub, and with that a principle of life asserted. Or is the most prominent LGBTIQ community outside of San Francisco just going to lie down like a rainbow road crossing and be ridden over unto dissolution?
The institutions, they make a desert and they call it care, and we are in a fight for our lives.
It’s rare to see the sacred cows of suicide prevention and early intervention mental health services criticised, particularly in ‘progressive’ media. They ought to be scrutinised to the highest degree. They marshal huge sums of state and private money. One sometimes has to venture to right(left?)-libertarian media like Spiked to get a decent critique of the tyranny of mental health discourse. I am all for adequate crisis services for people in need, as most Australians no doubt are, but the creep out into the bland psychologisation and psychiatrisation of life (e.g. “one in four young people will experience mental illness”) is culturally crippling. It’s politically and socially damaging as it diverts attention from the causes of distress, such as the warping impact on the psyche of poverty, social exclusion, etc. We need more of this kind of reporting.
And the conflation of generic sadness or melancholy with ‘mental illness’ probably causes more pain. Mostly it’s just life, and the world is pretty tough these days, not like the cushy full employment days of boomers youth.
Its almost an aberration to be mentally well these days. To do so requires Buddha like skills of detachment, or a love of ignorance and never watching or reading any news. The former is difficult to acquire, the latter is just a different form of early demise.
Melancholy is an appropriate, much of the time, but resilience is essential. Good psychological advice, often drawing on Buddhist concepts, can foster resilience. I’m pretty sure even the best pubs don’t.
I’d go so far as to suggest it’s regarded almost as an affront to the Big Mental lobby if you present as basically confident, stable, well-adjusted and unapologetic with it. Especially if you’re a conservative type. The preferred outlook The Progressive State seems to want in its Humbled Masses is a perpetual air of anxiously supplicant gratitude for fixing ills it didn’t even realize were making them unhappy.
In saying this I realize that I’ve probably caused some fragile teen somewhere to top themselves. For which I’m sorry, but equally for which I’m not really responsible, on account of my own mental health issues.
While I don’t have a particular love for the venue (music is always too loud for conversation, there’s a leaky smoking space that somehow evades regulations), I do acknowledge that it is an important social space.
Thus to remove a life-enhancing space to install a clinical death-mitigating space doesn’t feel a worthy trade off.
Thanks for raising the sensitive matter of an increasing suicide rate despite the approved therapies & mega-dollars thrown at the problem. It seems the more attention suicide attracts, the more the numbers rise.
Would a vulnerable soul find succour in a lively pub over a drink or in an impersonal clinic where a different type of drug may be offered as a solution…?
As I understand it the main reason the owners sold was that people weren’t drinking there any more. Trade had slumped over the past few years.
Thank you for this article, Guy. While I do sympathise with the loss of an historically and culturally significant pub, I question whether it would have been reported if it were any of the historic and socially pivotal regional pubs that had closed (you know, the ones that have community job boards, offer monthly yoga for workers in physically demanding jobs, offer a verandah for locum dental checks and act as a post restante mail collection service) rather than one among many urban watering holes that remain open.
Regardless, I thought your most interesting contribution was your allegation that suicide prevention institutions in general don’t help.
I appreciated the link to the annual mean data, but I don’t think it told the whole story. For example, what if suicide prevention institutions have helped to reduce the risk in some key vulnerable groups while the over-all social risk has grown?
More research and data needed here, please. There’s potentially a real story there, but to me it felt more like a Grumpy Old Bloke’s casual, drive-by shooting.
In the institutions war on life Guy is the Captain Mainwaring of the Resistance.
I work in mental health. The science of suicide prevention is very unsound, but the politics are so powerful nobody can say this.
Secure housing and compassionate jobs help would do more for suicide prevention than any number of dedicated centres, or silos, where every potential reason for suicidal intent/actions can be reduced to for the Procrustean bed of the service available.
Angel, thank you for this contribution. I’m a data guy (informatics), and often work in health data. The idea of spending billions annually in feel-good charity patronising and ignoring distressed people both horrifies me yet seems all too credible.
(This when the current Prime Minister is investigating how to get suicide rates ‘down to zero’ — which I think is ludicrous even as a question, but especially in a climate of aged care and youth unemployment horrors.)
The qualitative experiences you relate matter, as do the aggregate headline numbers Guy cited. But I think the compelling argument isn’t from either: it’s from trend data capturing outcomes in targeted vulnerable groups in regions where major programs are active, vs regions where they’re not, so we have controls. And we need sensitivity analyses for how much trend improvement occurs when budgets expand or contract by (say) 20+% to see how rates actually change.
That research may already have been done (I’d be surprised if it hasn’t), but it’s precisely the sort of research Guy needed to cite to make his point. E.g: institutional suicide prevention has been active in this community for X years with Y annual spend and hasn’t moved the needle in (say) under 25s or over 80s suicide prevention rates against annual trends in the same category.