Murder in masquerade

By: James Oppong


First year university lady from KNUST; Final year university student from UG; 16 years old girlfrom New Tafo in the Eastern region; An unidentified man suspected to be in his 30s at Achimota; A lady found hanging in the kitchen of her parents; A 70 year old man from Dogo, a suburb of Ada; An unknown man from Hallelujah, a suburb of Mataheko; A female patient from Ekye Presbyterian Health Centre at Affram Plains; A 32 year old driver from Ashiaman; and A primary 5 pupil from Dome pillar two.

The above is the list of the ten (10) RECORDED suicide incidents that occurred between a period of 14 days (ie March 1 to March 14).

Prior to knitting together ideas for this write up, I decided to read around for some figures and statistics on suicide in this country. Sadly, there exist no such official figures.

However, an anecdotal and journalistic report from citifmonline.com (2012) shows that about 1,556 people (thus an average of 5 people per day) commits suicide annually in Ghana.

Thomas Joiner, the Editor-In-Chief of the journal of Suicide & Life Threatening Behaviour, in 2005 came up with the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behaviour.

In that theory, he proposes that an individual will not die by suicide unless he/she has both the DESIRE to die and the ABILITY to do so.

According to the theory, DESIRE is developed when people hold two specific psychological states (burdensomness and sense of low belongingness/social alienation) for a long period of time.

On the other side of the coin, ABILITY is achieved when a person is able overcome self-preservation – our inner instinct that makes us as humans always try to avoid anything that causes harm or pain to the body.

Overcoming self-preservation is preceded by developing a sense of fearlessness for pain, injury, death, or even the aftermath of death. And this is achieved through a process of repeatedly experiencing painful or otherwise, provocative events.

From Joiner’s theory, it can be concluded that the decision to commit suicide does not just happen overnight. It takes a period of burdensomeness and/or sense of low belongingness for one to develop the DESIRE (at this point, the individual believes that dying is the only means to end the burden or his/her death will cost his/her family and friends nothing since they are no longer alienated). Even after the desire is developed, it has to take another period of prolonged exposure to pain, hurt, and injury for the person to be able to ‘kill’ his/her sense of self-preservation.

So, is it the case that society fails to recognize all the hard times these victims go through or a matter of fact, society rather creates the enabling environment for them to ‘successfully’ go through those moments? We live in a world that the hustle and tussle to make ends meet has made most parents and their wards live like landlords and tenants under the same roof.

Some parents live under the same roof with their wards but the only time they have any form of encounter is either the early morning ‘rush hour’ when kids are preparing for school and parents preparing for work or when parents come back from work late night to see the eyelids of the sleeping face of their wards.

There is hardly any form of quality time spent between parents and wards leading to the creation of an enabling environment for DESIRE to develop due to the low sense of belongingness. If this child is not lucky and the parent is slightly ‘abusive’ and constantly use abusive languages on the child at the slightest ‘failure’, then another room is created for the development of ABILITY to commit the act. Dear parent, if it so happens, has the child committed suicide or you have ‘murdered’ him/her silently?

In his song, entitled ‘Nnsempii’, KODA had a line that goes like he sometimes wonder whether some of the modern day sermons are sermons or professional seminar at GIMPA. The church, and by extension, our pastors should have been our last resort of hope and encouragement in times of hopelessness and despair; but what do we see? Prosperity sermons have now saturated the ambiance of our religiophilosophical thinking to the extent that most Christians are now in a state of what I describe as Religionism of prosperity.

Well, someone will be quick to quote Romans 8:28 to justify prosperity sermons but the same person will comfortably ‘refuse’ to look just ten verses up at Romans 8:18, where the Apostle Paul alluded to Christian sufferings, or James 1:2 or litany of such other verses that alludes to Christianity not being an insulation to sufferings and tribulations but rather, hope in times of tribulation. Now through prosperity sermons, most Christians tend to ‘breakdown’ with the least of challenge or tribulation because he/she has been conditioned that a Christian is for only riches and prosperity. In those hard moments, they develop the DESIRE because they feel God no longer for them.

There is a plethora of evidence that certain types of news coverage of suicide can also increase the probable recurrence of the phenomenon (the principle of contagion/copycat effect) in vulnerable groups particularly, adolescents (Gould et al., 2014).

The impact of media on suicide is most likely when a method of suicide is specified – especially when presented in detail – when the story is reported dramatically (some local radio and television stations on my mind). In 2002, the National Suicide prevention Strategy for England was crafted and GOAL 4 of it is to improve reporting of suicidal behaviour in the media – this was after enough evidence linked the recurrence of most suicide incidence to sensationalism in report of suicide news.

Do we have any standards for reportage of suicide among our media landscape? And if we do, is it enforced? Is the media (including social media) not rather providing the enabling environment for vulnerable people to develop the DESIRE and ATTITUDE? The list, of our actions and inactions that one way or the other lead to suicide, can go on and on.

We, as individuals and nation as a whole need to give attention to mental health and observe critically for changes in behaviour of our friends and loved ones for it does not take just a day to develop the DESIRE and ABILITY. In no way should our actions and inactions make people develop the DESIRE/ABILITY to die. Let us not ‘murder’ our own and masquerade it as suicide.