Suicide Watch

Jun 05, 2011 Editorial

Exactly ten years ago, the Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, declared suicide a major public health issue in Guyana and said that he was placing it on the front burner. He made his commitment at the launching of a study entitled “The Shadow of Death -a recent study of suicides in Guyana – Incidence, Causes and Solutions”, commissioned by Clinical and Forensic Psychiatrist, Dr Frank Beckles.
The Minister accepted at the time that there was no government policy on the scourge, and cited the dearth of reliable data. The study, actually conducted with data from 1999, found that eight out of every ten suicides were men and three out of every four suicides were East Indians. The suicide rates were highest in Region Two (Pomeroon/Supenaam) and Region Six (East Berbice, Corentyne) with the latter suffering 52.7 per cent of all suicide cases in the country.
To the surprise of many it was shown that two of every three persons who committed suicide in Guyana were below the age of 35 with young adults 20 to 24 years heavily represented among the victims. Suicide was taking the lives of the youths that were supposed to develop our country. The overall number of suicide victims averaged 160 per annum.
The Minister launched into a flurry of activity and launched a National Committee for the Prevention of Suicidal Behaviour (NCPSC). The Committee established some centres in Berbice but gradually seemed to have petered out. After a great deal of handwringing, by 2007, the Ministry launched a new body, the National Committee for Suicide Prevention (NCSP. The NCSP’s objectives were to: reduce premature deaths due to suicide; lower the rate of suicidal behaviour; decrease the harmful aftermath and stigma associated with suicidal behaviour and the traumatic effect of suicide on family and friends and promote awareness that suicide is preventable and train more persons in recognising mental health problems.
Since then, the Ministry of Health has conducted several studies of its own, all of which have confirmed the findings of the pioneering study. What is disheartening is that rather than decreasing, the overall suicide seems to have inched upwards. As reported by the Ministry of Health, there were 946 suicides in Guyana between 2003 and -2007, for an average of 189 per year.
At the “Suicide Prevention Day” programme two years ago, the Minister of Health had been very candid in asserting that neither the government, nor the region nor PAHO had deployed the requisite budgetary allocation to deal with suicide, even as they all acknowledged the gravity of the problem locally.
Since that time, there has been a new bout of activities involving national and international actors to first get a handle of the phenomena and simultaneously to make targeted interventions. There were reports of training sessions in suicide prevention that involved the International Association of Suicide Prevention, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Dalhousie University Department of Psychiatry to get both health care professionals and communities on board.
Persons were said to have been trained in a crisis hotline programme and GT&T was supposed to install the requisite communications infra-structure. Simultaneously with the intervention aspects of the pilot programme a detailed history of suicide victims (“psychological autopsy”) were to be compiled to discover specific causative factors in the Guyanese milieu.
A “gate-keeper” (influential persons in the community that may intervene to prevent suicide) program was kicked off. Since pesticides (especially gramoxone) are one of the most popular means to commit suicide, the Ministry claimed to have also initiated a program to institute a more secure method of storing the poisonous substance.
A week ago, we reported that the Minister of Health spoke on the Gateway Programme at Leonora to some Hindus. From his responses to questions from the gathered “gatekeepers” it seems to us that there has been a lack of sustained focus on reducing the suicide scourge, unlike that, for instance on AIDS. And the numbers bear this claim out.
A decade is more than enough time for a comprehensive programme on suicide to be designed and implemented. Is it a matter of funding or focus?

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