EVEN if an oversupply of midnight oil would inundate the eyeballs of philosophers who wax poetic about the “dark night of the soul,” prosaic could be the practical joke of the Grim Reaper. Thus it continues to be a challenge to hear his chuckle-heavy greeting: Make my day!
Brightness could trick us into a blind spot. So blink wisely, beware! Even such a livewire like Robin Williams can spark a startling reality check. On a short circuit, even cheer could leave us cold all of a sudden. As if a winter storm came overnight where a field of sunflowers used to be. Leaving us disoriented, the weather of discontent can take root any time, ironically nipping in the bud what blossoms may come.
“Suicide rates in the United States are highest in the spring,” according to the Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE). Listed in its website (www.save.org) is the statistical claim that “30,000 people commit suicide in the United States each year.” Is it brighter elsewhere?
Here in our nook of the tropics, a recent Sun.Star Cebu report sounded offhand, as objective as it gets. “Three separate suicide incidents happened in different towns in Cebu over the weekend,” thus it counted, suggesting that only a dour outlook could have threaded a trend out of such tales, as if these were less tragic. Unrelated, these “incidents” spawned by depression may be no less random than accidents.
In the wake of a call agent whose broken heart weighed all the way to his self-propelled downfall, the figures have been revealed as rising. When the Grim Reaper’s hobby is rendered no sweat by the victims themselves, some chills could break out of the recent data from the Cebu Provincial Police Office (CPPO): “In Cebu Province, an average of seven people committed suicide every month from January to July this year.”
Time, indeed, to sober up. Is it really “more fun in the Philippines” where the so-called blues can easily be bleached into the glowing terms of tourism officials? Where the threat of eternal damnation casts a long shadow from the fiery sermons of some Catholic priests who can’t hold a candle of mercy to suicide victims, the cloud of voices in one’s head had better be dispelled loud and clear.
No wonder the suicide rate in the Philippines has been reckoned as “relatively low compared to other countries.” Cold comfort, but we don’t really need to take the trouble of self-sabotage when there’s always a chance for others to do it for us.
Feeling down and out of synch with common sense, for instance, we can always souse up our sorrows in a videoke joint with a weapon-jerking version of “My Way.”
Out of mind, too, is the slippery slope that our country seemed to lose sight of. A 2004 report from the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the “Philippines has the highest incidence of depression in Southeast Asia.” That only “3 percent of Filipinos were clinically diagnosed as depressed” could be due to the probability that ascertaining the extent of mental malady hereabouts is often as tricky as the collective attitude regarding the erratic streak of our certainties, holding a cracked mirror to our social and political mindsets.
“Weather-weather lang,” so we say. Meanwhile, the WHO went on record in 2010 that depression was shaping up as the “number one disability in the world.” If what’s plaguing inside the head of some people has become pandemic—reflective of the sundry crises that have breached boundaries in the new global order—it would be reckless to discount suicide as incidents “separate” or hardly integral to a larger context, too scant to be framed into a pattern.
When sociologists talked of “private troubles as public issues,” they could not have been far afield from ascribing social ills as outgrowths as well of the internal inferno described in the pages of Sylvia Plath’s "The Bell Jar" or William Styron’s "Darkness Visible."
Clear-eyed, we may yet make sense of the far-reaching implications of Robin William’s larger-than-death story and how it could spotlight similar narratives of psychological breakdown closer to home.
Indeed, we are no stranger—each of us—to victims whose self-inflicted deaths at one time or another startled us into cluelessness because we thought we knew them enough, ignoring the fact that we were barely intimate of their illness and therefore helpless in our preference to see them less fragmented and more wholesome. Left grieving or gnawed by guilt, our sense of the “separate” has only succeeded in keeping us at arm’s length, rendering ourselves as the weakest link.
Connect, keep the conversation going on depression, “the strongest risk factor for suicide” as certified true by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).
Where we are, our own government’s Department of Health could help us come to terms with the necessity of nudging us closer into the lives of others as well as those within our comfort zone.
So we may know what exactly to do, seriously— to act accordingly; to ask questions; to encourage medical help; to follow-up on treatment—when we feel someone could be in danger of depression. Yes, to be dependable enough to defend ourselves from demons of our own.
(geemyko@gmail.com)