Friday, July 3, 2020

Suicide IS a solution


There comes a moment in everyone’s life when life becomes a burden. Instead of accepting an inevitable fact, we blame the person in distress for showing signs of “weakness”. The suicide of a 34 year old bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput last week shocked everyone in the Indian subcontinent. However, it showed very clearly that our normative aspiration for having a successful career, becoming rich, earning fame and adulation, simply cannot be a replacement for having good mental health.
As per the latest available NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) data, in 2016, suicide was the leading cause of death for Indians between the ages of 15-39. More than two hundred thousand people committed suicides in India that year. Most of them were students and unemployed individuals. Of course the number of Indians surviving with mental illness is much higher. So either the society has chosen to turn a blind eye or they have chosen to distort the reality by blaming the victim as it feels more comfortable to do so. But numbers don’t lie, repeating a phrase like “committing suicide is not a solution” is akin to ignoring the reality which is that, it IS a solution for more than a hundred thousand Indians every year. This reality needs to be acknowledged for any real change to happen.
In India, given the diversity of its population, the problem of acknowledging the truth has its own challenges. First we conflate the occurrence of suicides with various religious beliefs. The rhetoric that stems from people’s religious beliefs is even more confounding, we go to the extent of saying that a suicidal soul will not rest in peace so one should not commit suicide. How convenient!
If we do not conflate this mental health crisis with our religious beliefs, we conflate it with the infamous motivational jargon - “stay positive”. What does this phrase even mean? Saying “stay positive” to someone who is going through a phase of depression is a way of gas lighting them. Pushing them back into their shell and making them question their reality. Every time we say “stay positive” to people who have opened up to us, we have been culpable in killing the spirit of that person who chose to trust us with their reality. Instead of saying “stay positive”, we could try to empathise with their reality. We could ask them to go and speak to a psychologist if we sense depression or perhaps remain silent and let them unload their thoughts. Why deny someone their reality?
According to an article published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2018)[1], the number of mental health professionals in India is abysmally low. For every hundred thousand population of our country there is .05 (in Madhya Pradesh) to 1.2 (in Kerala) mental health professionals available for help. It is not humanly possible for one mental health professional to care for a hundred thousand patients! So giving fuel to these social media messages about shifting the burden of mental illness on the friends and family members of those who are mentally ill is again a way of denying that individual their right to accessible mental healthcare. Instead of demanding for national policies on improving mental healthcare by accepting that our country is going through a public health crisis, especially during this period of social isolation, we have chosen to turn to motivational speakers. If not motivational speakers, we turn to tantriks or faith healers to deal with mental health problems. Unfortunately, the loss of a very successful bollywood actor has forced us to address the unprecedented rise in suicides in our country.
It is time we as a society ask pertinent questions as to why have we not been able to train more mental health professionals to deal with this rising public health crisis? Why have we not focussed on asking for state subsidised mental health care especially for students and those who are unemployed? Why have we not made provisions for sabbatical for professionals for taking time to care for their mind? What will it take for us as a society to make these real claims? More suicides?
I am not going to delve into the other dynamics of our country’s population like gender, caste, class barrier and so on, that further disadvantages people when it comes to access to mental healthcare. It’s about time, we need to come together as a nation and encourage people to seek professional help without inhibitions. We should pride ourselves in caring for those with mental illness just like we care for people with physical ailment. It may be an invisible wound but it is very real for those who are going through it. It is the society that is weak as it is unable to handle the reality of mental illness not the mentally ill.
On an individual level we must look at how disconnected we have become in this age of connectivity and social media. As a society we Indians have forgotten how to empathise with varied realities and be kind to one another. We keep forwarding motivational messages on social media but in turn we keep losing our emotional capability to empathise with a person in distress. The actor’s suicide, the reaction from the public and celebrities, if we look at it closely, we will see that the problem does not lie with those who choose suicide as the solution; but the problem lies with society we live in, with us, who conveniently deem such individuals as weak. Let us stop being complicit to more suicides, let us take the conversation on mental health forward.




[1] Singh, O. P. (2018). Closing treatment gap of mental disorders in India: Opportunity in new competency-based Medical Council of India curriculum. Indian journal of psychiatry60(4), 375.



Author is a doctoral scholar. The author's research interests include gender, power relations, popular culture, mental health and intimacy.


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