I’ve written about this before as it relates to Japan, but last week the Yomiuri Shinbun reprinted a story from a Chinese newspaper on China’s suicide rate, which included some staggering statistics (roughly translated but I think you’ll get the idea) .
According to numbers released by doctors working at the Beijing Psychological Crisis Research Center,
*Every year over 250,000 people commit suicide in China; this represents one-fourth of the total number of suicides in the world.
*Ever 2 minutes in China, a person commits suicide.
*Over 2,000,000 people attempt suicide in China every year but are unsuccessful.
*Suicide is the number one cause of death in China among people 15 to 34 years old.
*Chinese living in rural areas commit suicide 3 times more than those in urban areas.
*Chinese women commit suicide 3 times more than men.
*28% of Chinese suicides have never had formal schooling of any sort.
One of the more revelatory aspects of the article was the fact that of the over 2,000,000 unsuccessful suicides, post-attempt interviews indicated that 37% of them attempted suicide on an impulse, less than 5 minutes after the idea had come to them. In other words, their attempts were not (necessarily) related to depression, and they had not spent any time contemplating beforehand the fact that they were about to take their own lives. This, along with some of the other data released by the report, such as the high rate of women committing suicide, or the prevalence of suicide in rural areas, runs counter to (Western) preconceptions on the hows and whys of suicide.
Suicide statistics never paint a pretty picture. In Australia, the rural areas are also over-represented (being young, male, and living in a rural area thus putting you most at risk).
Staggering statistics and quite horrible.
Why “western” preconceptions?
meenoo-
i think that suicide as discussed in the media is usually framed within a Western, and Judeo-Christian, perspective. I think those of us who grow up in Western countries (“Western” here is being used as defined in entries #2 and #3 of this Merriam-Webster dictionary page: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=western) are educated in a way that makes it hard to fathom that someone would choose suicide like they might choose what to wear or whether they eat cereal or toast for breakfast on a given day. I think it comforts us, and provides some measure of relief from our general belief that suicide is an abomination , to believe that most of those who commit the act do so under extreme duress, long bouts of depression, etc.
Hmmm. (^^)
I often think about these sort of things. I wonder to what extent you can transcend your culture and apply your own take on life. The more I think about it the less I can make up my mind…
I was uprooted from my own country and brought to another one (UK>France) when I was a kid. I can take the good from both and transcend the bad, as I sometimes feel like I am neither from here nor there.
Call me simplistic, but is accepting responsability for one’s direct actions and making decisions in one’s own best interest, that interest being that doing something that hurts others will invariably hurt yourself and vice versa, a judeo-christian heritage, or an ineluctable choice for survival and progress?
I’m sorry if the relation with these spontaneous suicides isn’t clear, but what I’m trying to say is that maybe a culture that pushes people to value life so little starting with the freakish abnegation of the survival instinct, possibly isn’t one that allows people to live in the best conditions possible?