[Mathew Moothasseril]

Suicides turn epidemic in ‘God’s own Country’
Published on: 10:57 pm, June 3, 2017 by: mattersindia.com

Suicides in Kerala


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By Dr George Jacob

Kochi: In the last weekend of May, I had an extremely disturbing and
difficult undertaking at hand. One of my nephews passed away. I, as
family, visited the bereaved family to pay our last respects. The
family was dear to mine. The person who passed way was a 27-year-old
engineering graduate. He was only in the morning of his life. He took
his own life one evening.

The incident shocked all of us who call ourselves ‘adults.’ We groped
for nonexistent reasons, and answers to questions like ‘why?’ Not that
it could have made a difference, as it was a tad too late. We were all
shell-shocked, and benumbed. The parents, especially the mother was
inconsolable. The household help since years, who had a big role in
rearing the dead youth wailed inconsolably, drawing tears from every
eye present there.

This is not a rare incident to have happened in Kerala. Suicide has
taken on epidemic proportion in the so-called ‘God’s own Country,’
that one wonders if the menace has become contagious as something like
scabies, or infectious as Tuberculosis! The situation is alarming in
India as a nation in this one unsavory phenomenon.

About 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide annually. Of these,
135,000(17 percent) are Indians, a nation with 17.5 percent of world
population. Between 1987 and 2007, the suicide rate increased from 7.9
to 10.3/100,000, with higher suicide rates in southern and eastern
states of the country.

In 2012, Tamil Nadu with 12.5 percent, Maharashtra with 11.9 percent,
West Bengal with 11 percent recorded the highest proportion of
suicides. Tamil Nadu and Kerala had the highest suicide rates per
100,000 people in 2012. The male: female ratio was 2:1.

According to the data with the WHO, the age standardized suicide rate
in India is 16.4/100,000 for women (6th highest in the world) and 25.8
for men (ranking22nd) causes for suicide in India were evaluated in
2014: they were bankruptcy or indebtedness(2,308 people),
marriage-related issues(6,773), non settlement of marriage(1,096),
dowry-related issues(2,261), extramarital affairs(476), divorce(333),
failure in examination(2,403), impotency/infertility(332), other
family problems(28,602), illness(23,746), AIDS/STD(233), cancer(582),
paralysis(408), mental illness(7,104), other prolonged
illness(15,419), bereavement(981), drug abuse/addiction(3,647), fall
in social reputation(490), hero worship(56), poverty(1,699),
unemployment(2,207), property dispute(1,067), and infidelity(458).

The situation in Kerala is bad. In fact real bad!

The population in Kerala in 2014 was 3,39,00,662, out of which 8446
took their own lives, accounting for the suicide rate of 24.9/lakh in
that year, while that in 2013 was 25.6, with the total number of
suicides being 8646, about and around which the rates have been
remaining steady.
The darker side is that, compared to other states, suicide rate among
youth and family suicides is on the higher side in Kerala. The latest
figures with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that 8,431
people killed themselves in 2011, the state accounting for 6.2 percent
of the total number of suicides in the country.

Althoug Kerala’s percentage share has come down, there has been an
increase in the rate of suicide from 24.6/100,000 population in 2010,
to 25.3/100,000 in 2011. Around 100 people attempt suicide daily in
Kerala, of whom 25 are successful. More men kill themselves than
women, the ratio being 7:3. 80 percent of the suicides are by those
between 15 to 59 years of age.

Hanging was the most common method (50 percent), followed by ingestion
of poisonous substances (32 percent) recent reports in the media bring
dismal pictures of increasing adolescent suicide in India, especially
Kerala, where social, health, economic and educational advancement has
taken place, keeping these indices comparable to developed
Scandinavian countries to form ‘the Kerala model of development’.

The Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore placed Kerala with high
number of suicides with 14.5 percenrt. The NCRB study discloses that
in 2005, out of 2,555 adolescent suicides, 1,328 were boys and 1227,
girls. A recent study conducted on 11,000 high school students
revealed that among the respondents, 27 percent at least thought of
suicide, while 16 percent planned and 8 percent attempted suicide.

These alarming figures unequivocally point to the fact that suicide
has emerged as a public health problem in ‘God’s own Country’, which
Kerala is known as. It is to be debated if the problem is really a
public mental health problem, rather than just a public health
problem! What prompts these adolescents, in the morning of their
lives, to call it quits? The causes are many:

• Poor parent understanding of the vulnerability of adolescents form
the prime reason. Adolescents and children are more vulnerable to
resort to ‘ending it all’ these days, thanks mainly to their almost
nonexistent capability to ‘cushion’ disappointments, setbacks, and
tough times, and trivial reasons like being denied an ice-cream! The
saying, ‘when the going gets tough, the tough gets going’ is foreign
to their psyche. A number of factors add to their vulnerability viz:
• (a) the joint family system having given way to nuclear ones,
• (b) The limited number of children, exemplified by the two children
or even, one child norm,
• (c) financial advancement, brought about by the double income
pattern, with parents having no quality time to spare for their
children,
• (d) later to ‘compensate’ for the aforesaid by lavishing their
neglected children with consumer goods, in keeping with the ‘consumer
state culture’ that Kerala has welcomed with open hands.
• (e) The parents then go on to ‘over expect’ excellence in academic
and extracurricular fields to which Mushrooming coaching centers that
rob children of their very childhood and holidays, and ugly skirmishes
unashamedly indulged in at State- level School Arts festival venues
respectively stand testimony. Adolescents and children are stretched
to their limits to meet their parents’ dreams, aspirations and even
highly bloated, unrealistic and self created ‘social standing’, which
in fact, no one else is bothered about, or interested in.

• Biological: children with parents and even siblings with suicide
tendency are known to be prone genetically to commit suicide, made
worse by coexistent mental disorders and substance abuse.

• Academic reasons: there is clearly an enhanced rate of suicide among
adolescents in India during the exam season. Studies disclose that
boys commit suicide three times more than girls. Suicides abound when
students fail in examinations, or fail to score expected marks or
grades. Social scientists term such tendency as ‘Rational Disaster’,
which is not curable, but certainly preventable.

•
• Media and network: overexposure to modern technology such as
television, internet, and ‘smart phones’. These are not bad in
themselves, if used appropriately. Children and adolescents these days
spend considerable time in the inanimate and virtual world of
‘technology’, than they ought to, and is necessary. Unfortunately, the
above said have a certain undesirable inbuilt ability to enslave their
users to addiction, like Ajinomoto does to a long list of junk food
happily indulged in by modern-day ‘foodies’ ! In the process of
enslaving modern-day youth, the latter become social recluses. They
distance themselves from peers and close relatives. Parents become
their enemies because ‘they fail to understand them’, become less
alive to their surroundings and are reduced to beings, slightly better
than the brain-dead! In this virtual world, naïve adolescents and
children are introduced to pornography, skewed sexual tendencies and
sexual promiscuity, which run incongruent to Indian culture, on which
they were bred on, making them guilty, confused and robbed of
self-esteem, ending up within a four walled prison from which they
cannot escape, even if they want to, leading them to the easy way out-
to ‘end it all’.
•
• Mental illnesses like depression, major psychosis like
schizophrenia, through chemical imbalances in the brain drive people
to suicide. These people require dedicated and understanding therapy
and healing influence of a team comprised of psychiatrist, clinical
psychologist, social counselor, family, friends, spouse, and
encouragement to indulge themselves in positive and wholesome
activities or diversions such as a hobby that interest them.

• Numerous other causes are: infidelity, leading to breakdown of
marriages (that end up in divorces), loss of identity among peers,
rejection and failed love affairs, conflict within families,
unemployment, debt and financial crisis, lack of spirituality which
undoubtedly anchors one to stability, amidst a raging storm. Isn’t it
after all said, ‘a family which prays together, stays together and
longer’ (if I may add).
Are there ways to turn people away from a decision made to ‘quit’ or
prevent them from taking a disastrous decision, to which chance to
undo is nonexistent ? Of course there are ways one could try, rather
needs to try to prevent people from dying gory deaths that suicides
often are (though such attempts are often long drawn, and require
patience, dedication and perseverance :

• People or youth known to have mental disorders like depression and
schizophrenia, especially if coexistent with substance abuse must be
treated by professionals, or a team of them adept at dealing with such
cases.
• Recent changes in mood, tendency to prefer reclusion, loneliness,
lack of sleep, anorexia and neglect of the self, like unkemptness,
unexplained waning of academic performance, disinterest in activities
and wholesome interests one was known to possess must be viewed as
warning signs, and professional help sought.
• Parents must keep away from forcing their children to dream the
formers’ dreams. They should be left alone, and encouraged to follow
their own dreams and goals in life, as youngsters tend to tune their
ambitions in keeping with their inclinations, attitude and aptitude.
Children must not be utilized as tools by parents to achieve ‘social
standing’. Tendency to prod children to do better than those of
neighbors’ across the wall, friends’, relatives’ and colleagues’; must
be resisted.
• Ways to get better than one’s colleagues and contemporaries through
one’s own children must not be employed.
• Excessive use of modern-day ‘technology’ must be nipped in the bud.
Though there are numerous positives in these technologies, their
propensity to trap their users into addiction must be realized, looked
for and quelled. The so-called ‘smart phones’ have wreaked havoc among
youth. While the manufacturers of these gadgets mint smart money,
their users are left far less smart. They become slaves to the
inanimate and virtual digital world. They become disinterested and
indifferent to the surroundings and themselves. They become ‘dull’.
Overuse also causes other health problems viz: reduced visual acuity,
arthritis of small joints of fingers, precocious spinal degeneration
and death on the roads through carelessness and distraction.
• One-to-one personal contact with relatives, friends and neighbors
must be encouraged.
• At the same time it is impertinent to keep tab on the ‘company’ the
youth choose to ‘hang out’ with.
• Youth must be encouraged to imbibe wholesome and healthy
spirituality (not religiosity) , as it goes a long way to have
something which is wholesome and healthy to hold on to, when they
fall, or begin to do so. Belief in God (not God men, warped cult
practices, or self-appointed ‘representatives’ of God) and dependence
on a gracious Providence surely do help, as does a regular prayer
life, especially when the going gets tough.
• It is always advantageous to liaise frequently with their teachers,
friends and others they are closely associated with.
• It is advisable once in a while to expose one’s children to that bed
of thorns instead of the bed of roses they are accustomed to, as that
would equip them to weather many a storm, and more importantly learn
to adjust to unfavorable circumstances and turn of events and
inconveniences, the lack of which is a huge deficiency in today’s
youth.



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*GATHER THE SCATTERED*

Fr Mathew Moothasseril
Sant Thoma Bhavan
Post Box 306
RAMAN MALA
Kolhapur,416 003
Maharashtra
INDIA