Suicide Awareness Week – 3rd-10th September

This is in view with the suicide awareness week – 3^rd-10^th September! I know I’m late, but better late than never.

Life is like a rented house, you have to leave it one day and go, go to unknown lands, anonymous destinations, but still at times you feel so low, so distressed that those unknowns look more promising than the present that seemed “promising yesterday”. What is it about life and its circumstances that make one succumb seemingly easy to end ones life?

Recently I came across an article that said India has the highest suicide rate in the world, a staggering and ever rising 10% in which about 40% are adolescents! Various reasons and circumstances have been cited as their excuse to end their lives, but none worthwhile. The foremost excuse being education and then it was peer pressure.

As per Asiaone, an Asian news portal, in India, at least 125 people aged 29 years or below are committing suicide every day and 51 per cent of the total suicide victims are graduates, college students or younger. Unbelievable ain’t it? But true.


I came across another site, maithrikochi, (Ive also used the graphs and pie chart from them too.) a Cochin based NGO, working for suicide prevention in Kerala, who told me that state wise it is amongst the developed and more progressive states that the suicide rates are much higher as that compared to the urban regions, than why do I always keep reading more and more about farmers killing themselves?  

Like from this graph, I gathered that Bihar has the lowest suicide rate average at 0.7 whereas Pondicherry has the highest average, astounding 50.2. And it was other southern states that also surprised me, like for example Kerala its average comes to 26.8. Now does his mean that education and literacy have a negative impact on our suicide rate? Bihar had the lowest literacy rate and at the same time Kerala is supposed to have 100% literate population. Amongst the top 6 slots for states with the highest average rate of suicide 4 are from the south. Tripura with 22.3, Karnataka with 21.7 followed by Tamil Nadu at position 7 with an average of 18.7, all this when the combined Indian average is 10.5 and this is the highest as compared to the world numbers.

It is also bizarre that we keep reading about students ending lives cause of all the above stated reason, but then their contribution to the suicide pie on basis of profession is a mere 5%, on the other hand housewives, ya my fellow ladies, are better donors, their share is that of 21.5%; second only to self-employed (who and what does this segment comprise of?) who are holding the biggest slice with a whopping 41%. I was thinking if they have included females working on their own under the self-employed section, then how does one decide the exact reason for taking their lives? I mean, take for example, a house-wife, working as a freelancer, but committing suicide cause of some household fight? Which sector does she fit in? Similarly, if a working student killed himself, how can we blame the education system for the same?

Since the 80’s our national suicide rate has gone up by 67%, it is not that life has become difficult and more turbulent as compared to that those days, it is just that we have become less tolerant and more demanding in life. I had read somewhere that these years are the best times to live in as per a survey, but then if this is the case why is our youth giving up so easily? What is it that makes a person end his or her own life? There was this instance in the movie 3-idiots, I would like to remind all those who ever feel suicidal at some point or the other in their lives, to keep a  picture of your parents or your loved one with you, and to look at it and think again if you want to end it all or not.

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