Addressing suicide requires a societal approach, says Religious leader

Aug 10, 2014 News

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By Sharmain Grainger

“Cruel” was perhaps the single adjective that frequently ran through the tormented mind of 13-year-old Keisha (not her real name).  How else could she describe a world that subjected her to pain no teenager should face, at least not alone, and certainly not without a comforting avenue to turn to.

Fear overwhelmed her very existence and she was left alone in her thoughts to believe that there was no hope for a promising future for her. After all, she was sure that no one else cared about whether she lived or died.
But life was not always doom and gloom for Keisha. She was once a happy, carefree lass with a family that she believed loved and completely adored her. As the only child to her parents, she was a princess to her father, and her mother was always attentive to her every need. Theirs was undeniably a loving family that resided in a comfortable rural community.
Although her mother was a homemaker she contributed quite well to the family income with her crochet and pastry-making skills. Her father was a reputable contractor who was always able to land lucrative jobs. Moreover, Keisha’s parent enrolled her into a private school where she was able to thrive academically.
By the time she entered secondary school, life would take a damning turn. Keisha’s mom became stricken with an illness that soon caused her to become bedridden. It wasn’t too long after she passed away. The loss of her mother was excruciating. However, Keisha was not the only one hurting.
Her father was overwhelmed by the loss of his wife to the point of becoming reclusive, even from his only child.
Keisha’s life from all indications started going downhill. She was forced to take care of herself and was rarely ever able to see her father, much less share her innermost troubling thoughts with him. Her performance, academically, declined.
Although finance was never an issue, love and devotion was slowly vacating the home.
Her father would take jobs that took him far away from home causing him to stay away for days.  And soon he made the unthinkable decision to ship little Keisha off to a maternal aunt’s modest home in a noisy and cramped urban area.  Her new family was a single parent one, with five children.
She immediately felt welcomed, and was able to share a room with five cousins – three boys and two girls.  Although she wasn’t use to sharing a room it seemed like fun to talk the night through until she was forced to surrender to sleep. Maybe the move wasn’t a bad one.
She wasn’t even bothered when her maternal aunt removed her from the private school she attended and sent her to a public school. It must have been because she wanted her to share the same school with her cousins, Keisha thought. She wasn’t concerned when she learnt that her father, who didn’t visit at all, was still sending money for her private school tuition fee, but was meeting the needs of her aunt and her children.
Things then started changing when her aunt began asking her to stay away from school to attend to a small makeshift snackette a short distance away from their home.
School was no longer an option for her, as vending took up the greater part of her day and some of the evening too. She’d return home in a state of exhaustion and at times wouldn’t even have the energy to eat or bathe.
But the most daunting development of her life occurred one Friday evening when she returned home. No one was there, but since the door was never closed, she simply let herself in. From all indications the family was out together, but didn’t bother to include her. She probably wouldn’t have gone even if she was invited as she was too tired anyway.
Moreover, Keisha simply retired to bed.
She awoke to an agonising pain coupled with an unnatural force pressing against her anatomy. Her eyes opened to see the dark frame of a man calmly rolling off the bed in which she lay and disappearing behind a doorway.
Her natural response was to scream as loud as her lungs would permit. But to her it seemed as though the screams merely resonated within the room and came back to her unheard.
Afraid to venture out of the room, Keisha hid herself in a corner of the room and prayed for the return of her family. And they eventually returned.
She was soon trying to tell them a horrifying tale of being violated, but no one seemed to care; not even her aunt or female cousins seemed sympathetic. It couldn’t be they didn’t care!
Keisha soon started questioning herself whether her imagination was playing tricks on her. Was she going insane, especially since she had no name or even a face to put to the frame she was sure she saw?
The days went by and no one would give her an ear. Customers at the snackette merely wanted to satisfy their eating demands and quickly moved on. But as if like clockwork Keisha’s aunt and her children the very next Friday were out of the home by the time she returned from a tedious day’s work. And it all happened again and in fact became a weekly ritual that she soon learned was a business transaction executed by her aunt.
This couldn’t be the life she would be forever subjected to. What had she done to deserve such an existence?
Thoughts of running away flooded her mind. But where, or to whom, would she go? Her father certainly didn’t want her and so there was simply no place for her.
It was at this point that thoughts to simply put an end to it all invaded her mind. It seemed like the only solution that would free her of the misery in which she lived.
The next day was Friday and she wasn’t prepared to be further violated. And as the family slept in the dark of the night, Keisha ingested the contents of a plastic bottle she had carefully secured in a corner of the room earlier that day. She had been able to solicit the contents from a customer, a farmer who was on his way to wage war against aggressive weeds.
By Friday morning, everyone was scurrying around, but not Keisha. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully in a corner of the bed she shared with her two female cousins.
It wasn’t long before Keisha’s aunt was shouting at her to awake and get to work. But Keisha was long gone, never to return.
While Keisha’s story is a tragic one, the option is one that a growing number of teenagers and young adults are opting for, not only in Guyana but the world over.
Situations of abuse and other frustrating predicaments are often reasons that prompt them to take their own lives in hope of ending a tormented existence.
TAKING ACTION
According to the World Health Organisation, Guyana has a high rate of suicide when compared with Caribbean territories and therefore ranks prominently on the list of suicidal countries.
Although suicide is merely seen by some as a mental health challenge that must be addressed by the Government through the Ministry of Health, Pandit Suresh Sugrim of the New Jersey Arya Samaj Humanitarian Mission is convinced that families, as well as faith-based organisations, have a role to play as well.
A Guyanese by birth, who has been offering humanitarian support mainly to areas of Berbice, the county in which he was born, Pandit Sugrim during a recent interview with this publication said that it is not very hard to see that suicide is an epidemic that has been plaguing Guyana.
And according to him, there is a clear indication that persons have been continually turning to this action “because we have lost our core values within the communities.”
The core values, he explained, are the norms that are first taught at the level of the homes and nurtured by the other societal organisations to enable young people to develop into productive adults.
He alluded to the importance of mentorship, which according to him, is greatly lacking, in many societies, which when coupled with rejection can lead young people to embrace irrational actions.  He insisted that this can easily be fuelled by early sexual encounters and drug use, which could even be a result of peer pressure.
“Parents and families as a whole have to take responsibility for their children and help them along…we cannot leave them on their own, even if they slip and fall and make mistakes. We can’t just leave them on their own…otherwise there would be no need for parents and families,” said an evidently concerned Pandit Sugrim.
According to the religious leader, who is currently visiting Guyana, based on his observation, there are many parents who do not find the time to nurture their children. But according to him, persons must embrace the notion that “a family that prays together stays together.” He went on to quote the famous mantra that “it takes a village to raise a child,” something he is convinced Guyanese communities should adopt in order to see positive behavioural changes of young children.
And through his Humanitarian Mission, Pandit Sugrim is prepared to highlight the need for serious action to be taken to save the youths in the communities.
“We need to get involve as a community. Whether we go to churches, mandirs or mosques, we all have to take responsibility for our communities…As leaders we need to have that sense of responsibility; we need to go back to being our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers,” he asserted even as he pointed out that the shortcomings in the communities are in fact “everybody’s business” and therefore should be addressed collectively.
“The preacher can only do so much, the Government can only do so much, but working together we can see changes,” he confidently insisted.
Currently one of the missing links in realising needed change in the society, according to Pandit Sugrim, is that of education. Therefore he emphasised that a strategic move towards curbing the suicidal epidemic could be by starting education drives to raise awareness about the facilities available to persons who are suffering from various forms of depression and other factors that could lend to mental instability.

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