Save Them

editorial:

Sikkim lost two 16-year-olds to suicide on Tuesday [newsreport here]. When this newspaper started reporting on incidents of suicide, it was in the hope that as such reports started appearing more often in newspapers, the concerned agencies, particularly the society at large, will notice the disturbingly high incidence rate and wake up to the need to address this problem. In the initial years, people did take notice, the government attempted a series of sensitisation programmes on suicides in schools and through panchayats. Even though these efforts were mostly superficial and poorly-informed, at least a start was made. Or so one thought, because like with everything which arrives without a groundswell of a grassroots demand, even these efforts remained perfunctory and the momentum was lost.
People at large, even though they unanimously acknowledge suicides as a worry, have not been moved enough to build the pressure required to weave the safety net which could save at least some lives. The traditional passivity of the society, that noticeable refusal to engage, is imposing a burden of guilt which now includes the lives of two teenagers who ended their lives at the same age [16], on the same day [Tuesday] in unrelated incidents. By next year, they will become mere statistics, added up to deliver Sikkim the ignominy of having more than 48 suicides per one lakh of the population, the highest in the country. Because public-memory is short and administrative attention-spans even shorter, it is important that the indifference, which allowed two teenaged lives to end their journeys within an hour of each other even before they had begun a life of their own, is shaken off, and some genuine efforts attempted to figure out how suicides can be curbed.
Admittedly, suicides, even though a universal phenomenon, its incidence varies so immensely across different population groups - among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion - that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. It is because suicides are so difficult to comprehend that most of us have come to regard suicide with an element of resignation... something that cannot be helped. While even medical science might be limited in its understanding of suicides, what is now universally accepted is the fact that suicide is a desperate attempt to escape something which has become unbearable for the sufferer. If that be the case, then it becomes our collective social responsibility to ensure that another escape route is opened for the victims instead of the option of taking their lives. What is obviously required is to help a suicidal person stop hurting. This might sound simplistic, but think again and it will be admitted that the social fabric of the State needs some mending to sew up the gaps through which so many lives are slipping out. The seminar on Science and Spirituality organised by the State Government last year was aimed at working towards introducing a curriculum in schools to make the young more compassionate. As a generation grows with a warmer heart, it will be more responsive to social triggers of alarm, something which the generation in charge at present appears to have gone largely deaf to. Still, there will probably never come a time when there are no more suicides, but if the society here could express a more kindred spirit, it could perhaps evolve a network of social organisations, specialists and public representatives to fashion a stronger support system for lives on the brink of self-annihilation. If the loss of two children too young for death cannot rattle the society into action, nothing will. That should not be case, and hopefully, when this section of the paper returns to the theme of suicides next, it will be with less pessimism; suicides, after all, cannot be combated with defeatism...