A Thought On The Wave Of Suicide

The suicide reports, in my well-considered opinion, have little to do with the touted economic hardship.

Suicides happen in the best of climes, perhaps even more so. Fact!

Away with the stereotypes. Stop the blame game. Discard the simplistic take and get on with rigorous appraisal of what is before us or better put, what has befallen us.

Is social media implicated vis a vis its quick spread of toxicity and the pressure it exerts on vulnerable minds to keep up with fads about what life and its satisfaction ought to be, which turns out to be everything it is not about?

Is the changing vista of family in our constantly pummelled culture culpable? Are our interpersonal relationships changing for the worse? What is the depth and overall quality of contemporary friendships and bonds? Is life morphing more and more into pockets of lone strivings than the robustly psycho-protective group affair that it was and, as is becoming clearer, designed to be?

Are the churches and other religious groups still communal enough to buoy up troubled souls? Or are they mindlessly drifting into the abyss of exploitative selfism of the flock leaders that further drains folks who, paradoxically, showed up in the first place because they thirst for succour? Can these bodies and their leaders take some steps back, step in and be of help?

Can the Psychiatric and Psychotherapy services be scaled up in this clime? Can mental illnesses take the front burner to create more awareness for what is an oft misrepresented body of organic diseases; and so deal a much-needed blow to the suffocating stigmatisation that drive those with a need to seek help further underground, off to a the dark place where suicide masquerades as an attractive option to the inevitable challenges of living?

Can we look back to our original social constructs as Africans, as humans even, especially as regards family, kit and kin? Can we step back a bit and pick up valuable practices that we ignorantly dropped or were cajoled to drop in our misguided quest to conform to an alien culture that itself mourns its own loss of soul?

We may have ignorantly opted for an alien way of living that is incompatible with our anthropologic and cosmic bearing. Can we do something to ensure we refrain from embracing a somewhat alien and certainly taboo way of dying? It is my considered opinion that we can if we commit to starting from the units under our direct control – SELF and FAMILY.

Let’s go there!

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