Even in a world of larger disaster and dismay, it is hard to get the Osbaston House tragedy out of your mind. A “friendly, very bubbly, outgoing” family of three wiped out, with house and pets and horses. All this, it seems, because the father's business was in trouble with Revenue & Customs and creditors. Christopher Foster's mother believes that her son simply could not face telling his womenfolk that they could lose their comfortable home.

So (police conclude) he killed them, shot the dogs and horses and torched the house and himself. His mother has said that he told nobody about his problems, and that many of his friends say that they would have helped the family out, if only they had known.

Irrational, wicked, crazy, unbearable. All the more so because - though extreme and spectacular - the case is not unique. Several times a year we hear of men (it is usually men) committing suicide because of money troubles, and sometimes taking their family members with them.

In July an American convicted of spamming escaped prison to kill himself, his wife and one of his daughters after, according to a surviving child, luring them into a car and asking them to come for a drive and “talk about the good times”. In Britain every year, stories emerge of family men killing themselves over debt, divorce, disgrace or business failure; in one case, even the failure to get his child into a good state school.

Of course, every suicide is different. Many spring from a deeper, darker mental root than circumstance: but in these cases the link between the deed and that crushing sense of male failure cannot be ignored. Women do not seem to go the same way, although some do take their children with them: the female trigger seems more often to be loneliness or abandonment. The breadwinner suicide is specifically male.

I was talking about this with a family man the other day and he observed lightly that, given the present unnerving financial climate, perhaps there should be evening classes in Facing Ruin. They could be undertaken in much the same spirit as first aid lessons or sea survival (you hope that you'll never need that tourniquet or life-raft, but you may as well know how to handle yourself if you do). There is plenty of information on the technicalities of bankruptcy, but little education about the emotional side.

There are innumerable texts, in fact and fiction, for the class to study. Try Kipling's If (not long ago voted the nation's favourite poem) with its robust injunction to “lose, and start again at your beginnings/And never breathe a word about your loss”. Here is Odysseus, the great survivor, forever fleeing unlucky islands and regrouping his forces; here is Abraham Lincoln failing in business, suffering a breakdown, losing the vice-presidential nomination, but four years later becoming President. Here is Churchill going through deselection, electoral rejection, unpopularity and demotion before hitting his finest hour; or Tennessee Williams claiming to be “pushed by the negative - the apparent failure of a play sends me back to the typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out”.

America has a tremendous rhetoric of facing defeat and bouncing back; the founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth, breezily observed that “everyone should fail in a big way at least once before reaching 40”. Edwardian England had a good rhetoric, too: middle-class children were brought up on E. Nesbit stories in which all the fathers seem either to be in prison or away struggling to restore the family's fortunes, while the children see their best toys sold and are told “jam or butter, dear, not jam and butter... play at being poor for a while”.

If you want modern examples of disgrace and recovery, in very different styles, go for the tales of Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer, the indiarubber Neil and Christine Hamilton or the more decorous rehabilitation of John Profumo. If you want women, look at Martha Stewart using her prison sentence to barrack for the reform of inmates' diet and get the place a bit cleaner; for more serious jailbirds, marvel at Ray Materson who taught himself embroidery with a plastic-bucket frame and an old shirt, and now sells his work for thousands.

There are plenty of bad examples for the ruin class to discuss, too - Milton's Samson Agonistes crying: “Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless” and pulling down the temple on himself and everyone else, a prototype Christopher Foster. Or more prosaically, bankrupt old John Sedley in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, who when his possessions are sold by Hammerdown the auctioneer reduces himself deliberately to angry, querulous, useless old age.

The subject could do with discussion, open and thoughtful and preferably before the event. If you go around assuming that your life is on a steady, dignified upward course, you are at least 50 per cent likely to be wrong. If you delude yourself that your fine home and stableblock are essential to your identity and (equally importantly) that they are the only thing that makes your family love and need you, you are in danger. Life is uncertain, fortune a turning wheel; the Ancients knew it and we should too.

Visiting a friend in prison once, as he contemplated his future, we hit upon the idea that the best way to look at life is not as a shapely single-play tragedy or comedy with a neat conclusion. Regard it rather as a picaresque, rambling 18th-century novel by Smollett or Fielding. You know the sort of thing: “Foundling saved from workhouse - gets maid pregnant - inherits fortune - gambles it away - deported to Australia - makes second fortune, returns, marries Squire's daughter - betrayed - joins mercenaries - shipwrecked and held as slave - loses leg - comes home in disguise to seek vengeance - thrown into prison - jailer turns out to be illegitimate son - escapes to France, makes third fortune...” etc.

He said that the idea cheered him up no end: it could go on the curriculum of the Preparing for Ruin course. Anything, rather than the self-indulgent Samson desperation of bringing the whole edifice down on everybody's head, just because you turned out not to be infallible after all.

To round off the class every week you could put on M People singing Search for the Hero Inside Yourself and finish off with a recitation from Tennyson's Ulysses:

“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
...Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

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