Why Caroline Flack’s ‘be kind’ message must chime with us all

I’ve been to two funerals of people who took their own lives. That’s two too many.
Caroline Flack (Pic: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)Caroline Flack (Pic: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)
Caroline Flack (Pic: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

To choose to end your life leaves behind so many questions which can never be fully answered.

The death of TV host Caroline Flack this week has sparked huge debate over the kind of cruel, mocking society we live in – where words are used as weapons to belittle, humiliate and attack others.

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She took her own life at the age of 40. She was beautiful, talented, successful, and under intense scruntiny with a court appearance imminent to answer a charge of domestic assault relating an alleged attack on her boyfriend.

In the aftermath of her death, people looked for a scapegoat.

The paparrazi who saw her as a commodity.

The columnists who commentated on every aspect of her life – and still pick apart the lives of many other women in the public eye.

The media who treated her life as tabloid fodder – and helped frame the narrative that then spills over into social media where too many people act as judge, jury and executioner.

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The online trolls who ramped up the bile and ensured it followed her 24/7.

They are all culpable to some degree.

It’s impossible to comprehend the pressure Flack must have been under as her career stalled, and her personal relationship was subject to the most intense pressure and public scrutiny.

The sense you are standing on quick sand in the middle of a maelstrom can be terrifying.

When your world spins off its axis, you need something, or someone, to stand firm. For some, the anchor is work, for others it can be their faith. It can also easily be drink or drugs.

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Coping with, let alone trying to change that sense of no longer being in control of events, can be crushing.

Our mental health is more fragile than it ever has been.

Thanks to social media we can no longer drown out the negative voices.

Thanks to clickbait, we get served up a wave after wave of ‘news content’ which is little more than irrelevant gossip about who has put on weight, and whose marriage is on the rocks. The data tells us this is what you want, so we serve up more, and more, and more. The cycle has to be broken.

One of Caroline Flack’s last social media messages chimed with so many people this week.

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In ten words she said it all: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”

It’s simple really –but also incredibly powerful.

Kindness can change people’s lives for the better, make the darkest days seem that bit brighter, and even pull people back from the very precipice.

But it has to be nurtured to find more space to grow within the toxicity of social media, and in the columns of the press.

We have to realise that words are weapons that can wound deeper than any blade. The 140-character assasinations have to be stopped, and the debasing of social intercourse tackled as a matter of urgency.

And if the #bekind message is to work, then it has to be more than just another fleeting hashtag.