Do not trivialise suicide, you charlatans

This month, on October 10, we marked the World Mental Health Day.

This year’s focus was on youth and mental health, a matter that has lately exercised the minds of Kenyans from all walks of life.

We have recently witnessed a spate of incidents in which relatively successful young people have killed themselves.

Many Kenyans have wondered what would drive a successful young professional to the point of contemplating suicide, suggesting that this should only be a decision available to the poor and the infirm.

The reigning opinion in some quarters is that people who think about killing themselves are cowards and should be treated as such.

Others opine that suicidal people are selfish and must be reminded of their selfishness in order to stop them from killing themselves.

HEALTH

Finally, there is an attempt to completely delink suicidal ideation, plans and attempts from the mental health of the person contemplating it, with a vociferous group going around asking whether everyone attempting suicide is mentally ill.

Proposed “solutions” to the problem of suicide being promoted by the untrained “experts” are equally bizarre.

For instance, those thinking that a suicidal person is a coward have proposed that shaming the individual will prevent the eventual suicide attempt.

They speak negatively of people who kill themselves, and behave negatively towards those that make suicide attempts.

They taunt people with suicidal ideation by offering to hasten the attempt and make it more “successful” — like showing them where to jump off a cliff or tall building, or the drugs to use in order to be more likely to “succeed”.

INTERVENTION

Those whose minds are fixated on the idea that people who attempt to kill themselves are selfish prescribe “interventions” consisting of constantly reminding the sufferers of the number of people who love them and would be hurt if they died.

“Think about your children/parents/siblings/spouse/friends,” they exhort.

Someone has even institutionalised this “intervention” and swears by a procedure in which a person with suicidal ideation is kept in isolation for days on end, being reminded of the people who will be affected should the person die from suicide.

Most of these charlatans, for this is what they are, thrive on the stigma our society has towards mental ill-health and the mentally ill.

STIGMA

They try to convince everyone that suicide has no link to mental health and can therefore be addressed without regard to the person’s own thoughts or feelings.

The tragedy is that the charlatans are winning, and our people are dying as a result.

The truth is that the vast majority of people who kill themselves have suffered mental ill health for long periods of time, and they will have even attempted to seek help without success due to societal ignorance and stigma towards mental ill health.

Refusing to accept this link is the same as refusing to control diabetes only to eventually amputate the limb that will inevitably be affected by the disease.

Lukoye Atwoli is the Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean at Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]