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In early March 2004, a 15-year-old student flung himself from the sixth storey of a HDB block. He took his life after his teacher discovered him dating a girl in his class and informed their parents.
When I was 15, I was so afraid of dying (I still am). There were, and still are, dreams to be fulfilled. Suicide was a non-issue during my school days. It was brought up only once in class, when the examinations were round the corner. Perhaps sensing the stress written all over our faces, our History teacher tried to defuse the situation by warning us jokingly about the price of taking our own lives - a funeral would cost our parents a bomb!
Before I could make any sense of why someone in the prime of his life would choose to end his so abruptly, the news bulletin ran yet another heart-wrenching story. This time, a 34-year-old woman and her two daughters, tied by red string to her wrists, jumped to their deaths from the 25th storey of another HDB block. It was later revealed that the mother was suffering from womb cancer.
Every time a shocking suicide case grips our nation, we start to scramble for answers. If the victim were in his or her teens, it could be examination stress, boy-girl relationships, school bullying, pressure from teachers and so on. If the victim were an adult, it could be financial difficulties, family problems, work stress, or strained relationships. In special cases, depression, mental illness and drug or alcohol abuse would be added to the list.
By and large, the cause - if not, "blame" - is pinned down on the individual victim. Victim A could not cope with school. Victim B could not live without her boyfriend. Victim C was mired in debt.
Without a doubt, such "personal problems" are crucial to understanding what drives people to suicide. But I sometimes wonder if some people do end their lives simply because of stress, depression or relationship problems. In the first place, shouldn't we be asking why some people succumb to depression, hit the bottle or fall into the debt trap?
Take school stress for example. Very often, the immense pressure students shoulder come from not only themselves, but also parents who believe they know best, teachers and principals fearful of slipping rankings, and neighbours and relatives eager to parade and compare their offspring's report cards and trophies.
What about people buried under a mountain of debts? Granted, some hit the rough patch in their business ventures, but we too are familiar with the image of the Prada-clad, Porsche-driving yuppie swiping his credit cards beyond the limit, all for the sake of putting up appearances.
As for those who perished from drug overdose, could their popping of Ecstasy, Ice or Yaba be an act of rebellion against the very system that had neglected, ostracised or even despised them?
In other words, while the motivations, decisions and actions of a suicide victim may be "individual", the push factors certainly are not.
It is about time we re-look that vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle that we have long overlooked: us, the people who make up the world that some people want so much to leave. For some of them, their world is so harsh, so unforgiving that it is not worth putting up with. Anymore.
According to the Samaritans of Singapore website, every day in Singapore, there is on average one person ending his or her life. This brings us to the next question: what have we become that we failed to prevent this unnecessary loss of lives?
For far too long, we have been so caught up in our cocooned worlds that we often lose sight of that distressed figure that might be standing on the parapet of self-destruction. Yet, as much as we need to seal up the cracks that some suicide-bent souls may slip through, we should be doing something before such thoughts were even entertained.
Save for the sporadic outpouring of compassion during national tragedies, our society is largely a faceless, critical and rather unforgiving one, supported by the pillars of competition, individualism, and materialism. Every man is an island. It's every man for himself. In order to elevate our own esteem, we end up putting down others. At the very least, we are all guilty of passing scathing or hurtful comments - deliberately or unintentionally - on everyone and anyone. She is too fat. He is so short. She has no fashion sense. He is stupid. She is useless. He can't even hold a decent job...
None of us is immune to being judged or mocked at. For some, the prospect of humiliation alone can be fatal. Perhaps that 15-year-old schoolboy was afraid of becoming the target of all jokes among his schoolmates. Perhaps, he could not bear to hear people whispering behind his back: "That's the boy caught red-handed by his teacher." Perhaps, he was afraid to face his disappointed parents.
It is probable that the cancer-stricken mother did not want to go through the emotionally-draining treatment. But I suspect she was also afraid that people would start treating her only as a cancer patient, and she would stop being a wife, daughter, mother, or friend. After all, we can imagine the discomfort felt by someone suffering from Down's syndrome when surrounded by glaring stares from the public.
Only when we put ourselves in the shoes of others and refrain from passing denigrating remarks, will those vulnerable to suicidal tendencies feel a little better about themselves.
Only when they realise that they are not alone and that there is someone willing to listen to their problems without judging or laughing at them, will they be ready to seek help.
Only when they can see a way out of their predicament, will the thoughts of suicide subside.
Of course, the call to locate the cause of suicide in the actions and inaction of our society, rather than in the individual victim, is not new.
Over a century ago, Emile Durkheim - one of the founding fathers of sociology - had already written about the subject. In his breakthrough study Suicide (1897), Durkheim states that unmarried individuals are more prone to suicide than those who are married and of similar age. Lower suicide rates are also prevalent among families with a great number of children. Such findings led Durkheim to conclude that suicide is related to the extent a person is integrated (or rather, not integrated) into his or her society.
Hence, the less attached one is to one's social groupings, such as family, school, or workplace, the less able are these institutions in reining in such "defecting" individuals. When pushed or provoked, these individuals are more likely to contemplate or even carry out voluntary death. Durkheim categorises this act as "egoistic suicide" and postulates that it is characteristic of the modern societies that we live in.
For a long time, our society's focus has always been on identifying the symptoms of suicide - depression, stress, alcoholism, you get the drift - and then prescribing the remedies. A better solution is to widen, not shift, the focus to include the manner in which we conduct our interpersonal relationships. Unless we become a more tolerant - no, make it accepting - society, some virus will continue to invade our society's system, undetected and untreated.
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