Easterine Kire
Many of us are mourning the unexpected suicide of former Governor Dr Ashwani Kumar. He was different from other governors of the state. In spite of having been the former CBI chief, there was little of the dictatorial about him. He and his wife were very gracious hosts to their many visitors. He gladly released a book on disability awareness that Dee Diethono Nakhro and I worked on. With a big smile he thanked us for giving him reading material that was other than the 16-point agreement, confiding further that he knew the agreement so thoroughly that he could tell us where all the punctuation marks were. That sense of humour put us at ease at once. We have lost a good human being. Though his association with Nagaland was brief, he won people’s hearts during his tenure.
This latest statistic forces us to open up the subject of mental illness again. Depression is real. Many suffer from it but try self-curing, because the very subject of depression is still closeted and not talked about sufficiently. It would help us to see how other societies cope with it.
The SOS center is a center where suicidal people can phone in and receive counselling.80-year-old SF who worked there well into her seventies, says she has often talked for hours to suicidal people. The center is open all night and the work is voluntary. The volunteers offer comfort, prayers and soft counselling. The results of the SOS center were so encouraging that the government has been supporting this church-based service. The tough side of it is that it is voluntary work and the working hours are at night, since that is the time most suicides take place.
A young man who has suffered suicidal stages confided that he heard voices telling him to kill himself because he was ‘worthless.’ The voices reminded him regularly that he was a failure. He tended to hear the voices at the lowest times of his life, when he had done badly in an exam or a competition. Some Christian groups explain that depression is a spirit. If it is a spiritual condition it means that it can be healed. Therefore, all the more reason for us to talk about it openly and educate ourselves on how to deal with it.
The situation of the Covid-19 pandemic has generated more cases of depression, and medical people are predicting that the number of suicides will be on the increase. That does not have to be the norm.
This September, on suicide prevention day, a woman openly shared with the newspapers her husband’s depression leading to his suicide some years ago. The brave woman did not want anyone to go through what she had. Bringing it out in the open, dissecting it in the clear light of day and exposing it for what it is – that was the aim of the sharing. As more knowledge is shed around the subject, people are learning to stop treating it as a taboo subject, and instead look for ways of concretely helping sufferers of such mental conditions.
The suicides of young people show a crippling incapacity to cope with society’s expectations of them. Time for society to do a reality check. Are we trying to fit people into square pegs and letting the struggle destroy the self-belief of the young?
I want to cite fifteen-year-old Catholic Carlo Acutis who died from leukemia. Before he died, he said ‘People were born as originals; but many die as photocopies.’ (The beatification of Acutis is being processed). Acutis divinely revealed the consequence of training our young to live according to the expectations of society. They are under pressure to perform, to get an education and fulfill a certain role in life that is respectable and brings in good income. Instead of helping them to find their original selves, and go on to be extraordinary, they are all encouraged and coached to be ordinary and limited and occupy a role that they do not have a heart for. Their capacity for creativity is overlooked and flattened from a very young and impressionable age. Not surprising that some people buckle under the pressure of trying to live up to societal expectations. We don’t need more photocopies. We need to learn more ways of helping our young to live out their lives in the best possible way that works for them. That is possibly the only way they will find out life is still more precious than death.
