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Following the September 11th 2001 atrocity, Western Government policies focused more on 'defense,' which undermines Government's commitment to reducing suicide. Annual US and major Western countries suicides were compared with '9/11' deaths to highlight the extent of mortality associated with mental disorder, homicide and road deaths are reviewed for contrast. The 3,074 fatalities of 9/11 are set against the US three year annual average 29,691 suicides, 17,077 homicides and 47,775 road deaths, thus every two weeks more US citizens died violently than on 9/11. In the majority of countries, there were more suicides than 9/11 victims, with suicides exceeding the 9/11 atrocity 18 times in Russia, nine in Japan and the US and three times in France and Germany. Annual suicides compared with terrorist violence should inform policy.

In the United Kingdom, clinical governance has become a master narrative for health care over the last decade. While many see this political imperative as embodying both enlightening and humanistic goals, I argue that it has also become an apparatus for resuscitating a hypermodernist worldview which further conceals the political drivers of health care delivery. While resistance to clinical governance seems futile, insistence on the inclusion of historical analysis in understanding modern health care delivery may be profitable. Drawing from selected dramatic texts by Henrik Ibsen, an historical moment of clinical governance may be analysed showing the complex interplay of the personal, social, empirical and ethical dimensions of health care delivery.