Let’s cut out the irresponsible comms this Christmas.
Warning: this article features an account of a suicide attempt and childhood trauma.
It was a Friday night and I was terrified. My dad would take me to karate lessons in a sports centre and then spend the free two hours in the bar upstairs drinking pint after pint watching TV without the sound on.
It was my last lesson before Christmas.
He crashed the car into a wall on the way home. I was in tears and he shouted at me not to tell my mum. I was 10 years old. He was a habitual drunk driver.
It was a Saturday night and I was terrified. I moved out of home when I was only 15 years old and lived with a friend of a similar age and two other men.
The men were in a gay relationship, were struggling with loneliness over Christmas and both suffered from severe depression although, at the time, I wasn’t emotionally literate enough to know what that really meant.
There was an argument I could hear through a wall followed by a long silence. We had to call an ambulance as one of them had tried to kill himself.
I thought about these two seemingly unconnected events that happened around Christmas within days of each other recently. I remembered my dad’s recklessness after reading a (paywalled) Telegraph article with the taunting headline “the joys of drink driving” which stated: “If a person is old enough to drink and old enough to drive a car, we must trust them to act responsibly with both.”
From my bitter experience, saying this is simply irresponsible and a false assumption. My dad is not a sole exception and the British public wants better protections from people like him.
But most of all, this kind of communication is terrible in the run up to Christmas when more people are tempted into drink driving despite the messaging.
Recalling the trauma caused by my dad drink driving was bad enough but only days later I was forced into recollecting my flatmate’s attempted suicide when BrewDog ran an advertising campaign with the slogan “tastes like commercial suicide”.
People with knowledge of the pub chain and Scottish brewer tell me it was rank stupidity that led to the flippant use of the word “suicide” in the run up to Christmas. Whatever its defence – and the Telegraph’s justification for the drink diving op-ed – doesn’t really matter because we can only deal with the fallout from their ill-considered words.
As anyone who has read my work – especially my book on desi pubs – will attest, I am very pro-pubs as community spaces and I yearn for them to thrive. But I don’t believe this should ever be at the cost of endangering lives. (I don’t even think being anti-drink driving is anti-pubs, whatever local you want to visit there’s a way of getting there without driving or for a driver to drink alcohol-free beer.)
And when it comes to breweries I want them to succeed whatever beer they sell, especially if they treat their workers well, although reports suggest that may not be the case at BrewDog. You would think that connecting suicide with beer isn’t something that anyone would knowingly do but it’s happened here.
What should happen is that anyone in the drinks industry who has the privilege to have a platform should consider the power their words have and how they could endanger lives or cause mental anguish.
And maybe the only way to fix this would be for the Telegraph and BrewDog to apologise, while donating to charities that battle the effects of drink driving and suicide.
