On average 800,000 people kill themselves around the world every year, making suicide second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds, and, the fifteenth leading cause of mortality overall. More people die by suicide than are collectively murdered, die by traffic accidents or are killed by animals. It remains entirely peculiar and anomalous then that the media monster should choose to bombard us with stories and images of celebrities - footballers, terrorists and televangelists - and eschew the subject of taking one’s own life and opting out of existence.
Judged by the statistical risk, says Alain de Botton, we have far more to fear from embarking on a love affair, which may lead to the suicide of one of the parties if things go awry, then we do from sharks. According to the data from the OECD club of developed nations the causes of suicide break down as follows: 45% are said to be physiologically based, to do with imbalances in brain chemistry, but, the other 55% are judged to be psychologically based; with people taking their lives because of grief about romantic love (32%), financial or career failure (10%) and humiliation, shame, despair or other reasons (13%).
Suicide then is a supreme reminder of our intense psychological vulnerability and of the deep difficulties we have in communicating this vulnerability to others, and, so of creating communities imbued with the right, life saving sort of attitudes. Governments of the Nations tend overwhelmingly to direct their efforts to dealing with poverty, illness, security and ageing. Suicide alerts us to a stranger problem we have; the scale of our psychological torment, the extent of the fragilities of our minds, which cannot necessarily be fixed by more money or consumer goods. From the causes of suicide we learn how intensely we need love, self-acceptance, meaning, hope, status, pride and forgiveness. These qualities are no mere luxuries - they can save lives.
It’s literature that has, perhaps more than any other medium, alerted us to how much these qualities matter. In 1899, in Kate Chopin’s fiction ‘The Awakening’, the protagonist Edna Pontellier commits suicide because she is unable to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes: we learn from this that our need for status and self-acceptance is real and visceral. In 1856, in Gustav Flaubert’s novel ‘Madam Bovary’, a young mother commits suicide with arsenic since she has been shamed by her community because of her romantic and financial transgressions: we learn from this that to survive we need respect and forgiveness. In 1599, in William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, Ophelia chooses to die rather than live without her beloved Hamlet: we learn from this that to survive we need love, and, mechanisms for coping with its loss. In 1877, in Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ (the plot of which is intertwined with suicide), the hero Levin contemplates suicide by keeping a rope in his office as he’s lost all sense of meaning and direction: from this we learn that to survive we need purpose and significance. And on February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath, author of the “Bell Jar”, committed suicide after placing her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She had sealed the kitchen with wet towels and cloths to stop carbon monoxide leaking out to where her children lay sleeping in the next room: from Plath’s poetry, personal history and prose we learn that in order to survive we need hope.
What makes many suicides so bewildering is the element of surprise; we may have known that a certain person had troubles but we didn’t begin to imagine them on that scale. However, it is in fact surprise itself that is evidence of our unwitting neglect of one another (and of our selves). We are reluctant to accord our psychological needs the centrality they deserve. Here is the philosopher Arthur Schöpenhauer considering the matter in 1818: “We should always be mindful of the fact that no man is ever very far from the state in which he would readily want to seize a sword or poison in order to bring his existence to an end.”
It’s quite telling that some countries have a higher rate of suicide than others; In Kuwait the rate is close to zero or 0.1 per 100, 000 people where as in India and France it’s closer to 10 and in Japan it’s distinctly higher with 17.9 and China, the factory of the world, has the highest rate of all at 26.6 per 100,000 people. The numbers suggest that while no society can completely eliminate grief there much to do around the interpretation and acceptance of difficulty which can lessen the risk of suicide. Societies with low suicide rates have a greater acceptance of failure, a higher role of forgiveness, and a status system that honours intrinsic values over achievement. Suicide is the greatest symbol we have of the shared difficulty of being all too human. That its existence continues to surprise us is a sign that there are much greater levels of distress at large than we are normally ready to countenance. Yes, only a tiny portion of the population do ever commit suicide but the fact that some do so is evidence of the scale of our hidden anguish. It is proof of how fragile we all are and therefore owe each other and ourselves much more compassion than we tend to give.
On September 1st in Karachi, a 16-year-old boy shoots his girlfriend before committing suicide himself. Two ‘suicide’ letters are later discovered in the assembly grounds of their school. The letters, addressed to the their respective parents, state that the pair have committed suicide due to their parents’ resistance against their intentions to get married. In the letter, the writers also request that their bodies be buried next to each other.
Soon after this story broke there were pundits and sages galore, offering advice and explanation; ranging from the much expected projection, vis-a-vis attacking Bollywood and Indian culture, to the criminally overused critique of ‘westernisation’, vis-a-vis western liberal values cannibalise our own homegrown, domestic produce. And while we indulged in listening to them concoct the loose collection of nonsense we call television and news, somewhere, somehow in our condescension we forgot to ask the question ‘What is suicide?’ and ‘what happens when civilisation and society meet innocence and adolescent angst?’
And so it was my intention that this may serve as an adequate requiem for their suicide; for both the act and the phenomenon. And perhaps even help present a clearer reflection of the societies we choose to create.