Suicide, a mysterious phenomenon

My friend’s daughter, all of 15 years of age, living in Bangalore, seemed to know a great deal about suicide – information on methods which are least painful in taking one’s life. She said she had read up stuff on the Internet. I was aghast.

When I asked her what made her think of collecting this information, she said “just like that” – that, in her peer group, it was fashionable to know about suicide as there was a lot of it around. Especially among school students, in Bangalore and Chennai, who couldn’t handle the pressure of delivering academic results to please their parents.

Another friend narrated the story of a suicide within her friends’ circle – a 15-year-old girl, in Chennai, who jumped from a building a couple of years ago because she couldn’t deal with the shame of not performing in school and not being able to keep up with the same high standards of her older sister, which her parents demanded.

Then I came upon an article, ‘Suicide elusive, but not always unstoppable’, in The Economist which dealt with this very topic. Here’s an excerpt:

“Suicide rates have been rising in India, especially among the young, and over a third of those who kill themselves are under 30 years old.

But suicide is a mysterious phenomenon; it defies generalisations. Emile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, wrote in 1897 that suicide rates were a key sign of the state of a community. It was commonest, he reckoned, at two extremes—highly controlled societies, or loose, atomised ones. Since then, his successors have filled thousands of books with theories about what makes people take their own lives: the negative factors which remove the desire to live, and the positive ones that can make self-killing an attractive or even “fashionable” option.

In India, the desperation of students has been studied relatively little compared with that of farmers, who have killed themselves in rising numbers in recent years: over 17,000 died by their own hand in 2003. The trend is often ascribed to debt, drought and the ready availability of pesticides that serve as poison.

But in India no less than elsewhere, the inner turmoil that makes people end it all usually has complex causes: social dislocation, family tensions or long-term depression. No group escapes. The country's suicide capital is booming Bengalooru (Bangalore), where most of those who do it are skilled workers; housewives are the next-biggest category. Some reports say suicide became common among Indian farmers only in the late 1990s, after agrarian and trade reforms introduced a few years earlier by a liberalising government. In truth, such deaths were probably going unrecorded for decades before that. Official data tell us as much about social mores (the extent to which self-killing is concealed) as about what really happens.”

[Citation: ‘Suicide elusive, but not always unstoppable’, The Economist, 21 June 2007]