Nearly every third person who commits suicide in Goa does so either out of mental illnesses, frustration or depression, with alcoholism being the other most common cause for suicides here.
Official statistics reveal that of the nearly 887 people who ended their life between 2011 and 2013, 338 people did so either because of mental illnesses, frustration and depression. When averaged out, the statistics meant that the State was witnessing more than five suicides a week or one every workday, if one excludes the weekends. 5.61 persons committed suicide every week amounting to 877 over the three year period.
Goa may boast of having one of the best health and social indicators in the country, including the lowest infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, etc, but when it comes to mental health, Goa lags far behind the rest. While India’s national average is 11.7 suicides per a population of one lakh, the suicide rate in Goa is 18.4 per one lakh population.
A study published in the lancet Journal in 2012, ranks Goa as the fifth State in the country as far as deaths due to suicides in India’s smaller States go. This is especially damning since Goa is the smallest State is area and the fourth smallest in terms of population.Namdev Gawas and Satish Sawal two students at Goa’s Damodar college say that Goa’s healthy social indices do not paint the real picture of what is simmering under this State.
“What is clear is that despite its apparently privileged position in terms of its economy, environment and overall health infrastructure, mental illness is at least as much of a problem (if not more so) in Goa as elsewhere. In addition to the illnesses typically attributed to mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder (also called Bipolar Disorder), mental health problems include a wide variety of other, much commoner conditions such as depression, suicidal behaviour, marital conflict, drinking problem, learning difficulties and child abuse,” they says in their research paper titled ‘Sadness in paradise: Mental health in Goa’.
Other than mental illness or depression people, both young and old, take their own lives for a variety of reasons including failure to get jobs, frustration, depression, failed love affairs, amongst others.More worryingly, their study found that amongst persons above the age of 16, “more than a third of the patients were found to suffer from a clinically significant depression or anxiety disorder”.
Other reason attributed for the high suicide rate is alcoholism in a State that almost prides itself on offering cheap alcohol, one of the major draw for local tourists in the State.“Use of alcohol in self or in spouse is known to be associated with higher suicide rates,” Anil Rane a consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour (IPHB) in Goa, who has teamed up with Abhijit Nadkarni, a fellow at the london School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Goa’s suicide stats show that 63 persons died in the three-year period due to alcohol addiction. Failure to secure jobs as well as parental pressure and fear of failure of exams has been blamed for other suicide rates.The Goa Government had begun a school counselling programme, whose analysis has also thrown up troubling results. 15,447 students met counsellors in schools regularly through one year and their analysis has revealed some startling results.
1,317 students suffered from emotional difficulty, 943 were affected by relationship issues and 203 students were addicted to substance abuse. Startlingly, 56 students the counsellors interacted with had already attempted suicide, while 317 had trouble coping up with emotion and 1155 suffered from trauma stemming from social behavior issues. 251 suffered from low self-confidence, while 438 were grappling with health issues.
“The diverse socio-economic and cultural levels of the students and the increased competition at school for achieving higher academic grading plays havoc with the young minds more so with the vulnerable sections of the society thereby falling prey to addictions of alcohol, tobacco, drugs and at times gambling,” says Goa government’s education director Anil Powar.
“The fear of failure also makes the makes the mind lose self-confidence and leads to psychological imbalances and leading to incidents of suicides amongst the susceptible youth,” he further points out.But perhaps the most unusual suicide the state has witnessed is the double suicide of two tourists in the state.