Suicide is the second leading cause of death among millennials and Gen-Z in the world. In India, more than 160,000 people lost their lives to suicide in 2021. Yet most of us don’t even want to acknowledge this threat, let alone address it.
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September is observed as suicide prevention month in many Western countries, but India still fails to recognize the importance of mental health. This is what I learned after losing two people I loved to suicide.
break the chain
I was six years old when my mother set herself on fire. Although I was very young, I remembered the many, many times that she had talked about dying by suicide, usually when she was in a bad mood. I also remembered that no one paid attention to these warning signs. ‘She must be saying it with anger’, they all thought, until her thoughts came true.
Consumed with rage at the people who had allowed my mother to take her own life, I grew up to be short-tempered, cold, aggressive, and impulsive. It was a coping mechanism for grief, but I had no idea it was affecting my mental health until I suffered another suicide loss 20 years later. I sought professional help and have now come to terms with these losses, but it has been a long and difficult road to this point.
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Suicide does not kill a single person. It severely affects the people around them. In some cases, it destroys mental health. This leads to a chain reaction of delusions. This chain needs to be broken and this is how it is done:
learn to listen
Every time a celebrity commits suicide, the world howls about “suicide and mental health.” So it’s weird that people go deaf when someone they know tries to talk about their state of mind.
If I could go back in time, I’d listen to my mom. Why did she talk more often about killing herself when she was angry? If-only regret makes life heavy for those close to those who committed suicide. So please listen while there’s still time.
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Understand so you can act
Spend some time understanding the how, what, why, and when of your suicidal triggers. Then take them to seek psychiatric help, or alert those close to them, or inform suicide control boards. Only empathy will help them. Not sympathy.
Never again!
Finally, get it permanently in your head that no one talks about taking their own life for ‘attention’ or just random. Don’t ignore even the smallest of signs when it comes to anyone’s mental health. Period.
Dave Dharmesh
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Dharmesh Dave is a brand communications professional.
I Say Chaps is a column that allows passionate and creative people a platform to have your opinion.
From HT Brunch, September 24, 2022
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