NO LIGHT AHEAD!

Jan 12, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

This year has started tragically for Guyana. A spate of robberies, in which the victims were murdered, has been accompanied by a spate of suicides and attempted suicides.
The government has been quick to respond. But how successful will be that response considering that data on suicide in Guyana, its incidence and its distribution are a well-guarded secret? There is also a paucity of in-depth cross-sectional studies on this phenomenon which has countless lives in Guyana.
It is easy, of course, to detect, without research, patterns of suicide in Guyana. It occurs predominantly in rural communities. Suicide rates are higher in farming areas which have easy access to herbicides and weedicides. Suicide amongst women is higher than men. More East Indians commit suicide that any other ethnic group.
These patterns which can be empirically verified do not tell the whole story. They tell us that suicide is a major problem within East Indian communities. They tell us that most victims prefer the use of toxic poisons to kill themselves. But do they indicate why people kill themselves?
There are a number of problems with analyzing suicides in Guyana. Apart from the issue of the reliability of the data, there is the more serious issue of analyzing the data.
Suicide rates in Guyana are high. These high rates have in recent times been distorted by the fact that counting among the persons who commit suicides are those persons who commit murder in the course of domestic violence and then decide to end their own lives.
The large numbers of murders who opt to take their lives rather than face the Courts suggest two things. They indicate that in any analysis of suicide account has to be taken of this factor which should not be confused with other cases in which persons take their lives within having committed a crime.
The large number of murder-based suicide also point to an important causal factor, hopelessness. The presumption has always been that people who kill themselves have problems and these problems that push people to suicide. This may be true but it is not the reason why they kill themselves.
Research elsewhere has established this. Last year, Psychology Today published an article by Dr. Todd Kashdan in which he asserted that people do not commit suicide because they are in pain; they commit suicide because they see no reason for going on living. Hopelessness is therefore, according to this research conducted in the United States, one of the main reasons for suicide. This will explain why a well off young lady would throw herself off the Kaieteur Falls after putting a note on social media asking, “What is the use having everything and not being happy?” She had everything except happiness. She saw no hope and therefore she jumped.
The men who kill their paramours and then take their lives also see no hope. They know that the death penalty is facing them. They therefore end their lives.
A man was once charged by the Guyana Revenue Authority for not paying his entertainment tax for a small dance that he usually holds. The man was taken before the court and his composure crumbled. He saw only problems ahead and so he ran out of the court and jumped into the river.
A former part-time cricket commentator had cancer. One New Year’s eve, he parked his vehicle in front of a funeral parlour and blew his brains out. It was not the pain that he was enduring that drove him to kill himself; it was the fact that he had nothing to look forward to in the future other than this pain. It was hopelessness that drove him to commit suicide.
Another prominent citizen who had everything he wanted also killed himself because of his illness. He also saw only hopelessness.
The problem that the government should be addressing is not suicide, it is hopelessness. Everyone has their problems but not everyone will take to committing suicide.
Why some people succumb to the fear of hopelessness, it is just as complicated. There are cultural rather than ethnic factors at work. There is also the issue of the easy availability of deadly poisons.
It is important that the government not go looking to solve relational problems as a strategy to reduce suicide. They should address why people see no light ahead.

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