Den­zil Mo­hammed

Two weeks ago, 15-year-old Re­hana Nand­lal, of Bar­rack­pore com­mit­ted sui­cide. The next day, her ap­par­ent lover Hy­dar Mo­hammed did the same. They both drank weed­i­cide. It is telling that the girl's sui­cide was big news sole­ly be­cause of her ap­par­ent sex­u­al re­la­tion­ship with the 52-year-old se­cu­ri­ty guard at her school in Bar­rack­pore. It is al­so telling that the re­sponse from the pub­lic has fo­cused sole­ly on that re­la­tion­ship, and not on the sui­cides them­selves. The tragedies have been treat­ed with de­ri­sion and dis­gust. On­line, com­ments on the sto­ry read like rum-shop talk rather than a con­do­lence book:

• "Dis­gust­ing that old goat. You bet­ter dead than alive, be­cause suck­er you would not make it in jail."

• "A swift death is no jus­tice at all."

• "This is nasty...then took the easy way out. His fam­i­ly should nev­er arrange a fu­ner­al."

Few would ar­gue that the re­la­tion­ship was in­ap­pro­pri­ate...and il­le­gal. But the is­sue is far big­ger than that. And yet, like with our pol­i­tics, the race talk and every­thing else, we get caught up in the scan­dal of it with­out see­ing the re­al prob­lems. We en­joy think­ing that T&T is not a place for sui­cides. This is per­haps be­cause we are ig­no­rant of the facts. Or maybe we're just obliv­i­ous; af­ter all, our alarm­ing­ly high homi­cide rate is ob­vi­ous, and we still want tourists to come, want to raise our chil­dren here, want to con­tin­ue to live like "nor­mal."

• T&T ranks in the top 40 of the world's high­est sui­cide rates by coun­try (World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion, 2008.)

• It out­ranks coun­tries af­flict­ed by war, pover­ty and strife such as Bosnia and Herze­gov­ina, In­dia and Nicaragua. It al­so out­ranks the USA.

• Six­ty-eight per cent of sui­cides in T&T are the re­sult of in­gest­ing agri­cul­tur­al poi­sons-more than Chi­na (In­ter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Epi­demi­ol­o­gy, 2003.)

• There was a 319 per cent in­crease in male sui­cide rates in T&T from 1978 to1992 (In­ter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of So­cial Psy­chi­a­try, 1997.)

• Low pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty, low in­come, East In­di­an eth­nic­i­ty and al­co­hol con­sump­tion are sig­nif­i­cant­ly cor­re­lat­ed to sui­cide in T&T (West In­di­an Med­ical Jour­nal, 2003.)

• "Six­ty to 75 per cent of sui­cides hap­pen in a belt reach­ing from San­gre Grande to Ca­roni via dis­tricts like Rio Claro, Siparia and San Fer­nan­do" (T&T Guardian, 2003.)

• Every day, three or four peo­ple are ad­mit­ted to the Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al hos­pi­tals for at­tempt­ed sui­cide (T&T Guardian, 2003.)

• From 1991-2000, there were more sui­cides than mur­ders (T&T Guardian, 2003.)

Lit­tle re­search, re­sponse

So sui­cides in T&T are not iso­lat­ed or rare. And these sta­tis­tics are on­ly for those deaths that are ac­tu­al­ly re­port­ed as sui­cides. Fam­i­ly "shame," re­li­gion and oth­er unim­por­tant fac­tors pre­vent ac­cu­rate re­port­ing of the re­al sui­cide epi­dem­ic in T&T. A graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of sui­cide rates over time makes ap­par­ent the in­crease, es­pe­cial­ly the more than 300 per cent jump from the '70s to the '90s. Be­fore mur­der in T&T be­came the every­day part of life that it is now, sui­cide claimed more lives. And yet, with such a cri­sis fac­ing the coun­try, the on­ly re­sponse seems to have been un­der­staffed units at hos­pi­tals, clin­ics that al­low for a 15-minute treat­ment of de­pressed pa­tients and a hot­line ad­ver­tised by small, in­con­spic­u­ous black-and-white ads run­ning spo­rad­i­cal­ly in the news­pa­per.

An on­line search for "Trinidad sui­cide" re­veals even less, show­ing how the lack of re­sponse or recog­ni­tion of the high sui­cide rate comes from even the high­est re­lat­ed of­fices in the land. Giv­en the clear-cut trends on sui­cides in T&T-that it is most­ly done by peo­ple of a cer­tain gen­der (men), age (25 to 34), ed­u­ca­tion sta­tus (low), eth­nic­i­ty (East In­di­an) and lo­ca­tion (rur­al Trinidad/"sui­cide belt") and that agri­cul­tur­al poi­sons are the killer of choice-shouldn't there have long been a big­ger, bet­ter re­sponse?

Pes­ti­cides, like a pletho­ra of oth­er dan­ger­ous sub­stances and drugs avail­able on­ly with a pre­scrip­tion every­where else in the world, are avail­able for every­one in T&T. In the USA, one must now show proof of age to buy even Nyquil at a Tar­get store, giv­en that teenagers be­gan us­ing it to get high. Rur­al ar­eas are out of the scope of many so­cial ser­vices like coun­selling and hos­pi­tals, de­spite the clear need for them there.

There is a dearth of re­search on the sub­ject. The scat­tered stud­ies one would find in an on­line search come al­most ex­clu­sive­ly from one man, Dr Ger­ard Hutchin­son, who in 2003 was named as a se­nior lec­tur­er and head of the Psy­chi­a­try Unit in the De­part­ment of Clin­i­cal Med­ical Sci­ences, UWI. And crit­i­cal re­port­ing on the is­sue came from just as few jour­nal­ists. The one lo­cal­ly pub­lished ar­ti­cle quot­ed above was writ­ten by Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni. This lack of every­thing ex­cept the num­bers of sui­cides, them­selves, cou­pled with the dis­dain, dis­re­spect and in­dif­fer­ence from the pub­lic, has en­abled not on­ly the bur­geon­ing sui­cide rate in T&T, but al­so the dis­re­spect met­ed out to vic­tims and their mem­o­ries. In­stead of the bac­cha­nal and scan­dal and con­tro­ver­sy to which we pay at­ten­tion so acute­ly, here's a re­al is­sue that we can ac­tu­al­ly deal with.