Grief, Shame, and Jealousy.
The Hindoos seem to be very sensitive to some trifling annoyances, which the Englishman would take no notice of, and suicides are not uncommonly the effect of insults and imputations. Thus, the Commissioner of the Chota Nagpore district mentioned the case of a woman who poisoned herself because her husband complained of her untidiness, and another because she was asked to feed her own child, instead of being provided with a nurse. A wife killed herself because a friend told her that her husband was illegitimate.─Bellasis.
Forbes mentions that when he was at Dhuboy suicide was very common among Hindoo widows of the upper classes, who being interdicted from marriage threw themselves into the wells after perceiving the results of their imprudences. Jealousy is also a very fertile cause of suicide among Hindoo women.
The means used for committing suicide in India are among females almost always drowning, especially in wells, and among the males drowning and hanging are about equally common.─Muir of Madras.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
THE PREVENTION OF SUICIDE, AND THE TREATMENT OF THE SUICIDAL TENDENCY IN THE INSANE.
It is a terrible thought that our much boasted civilisation and modern educational advantages bring with them a suicide rate which nothing so far has been found to check.
The struggle for existence, at our present high pressure, ends in the survival of the strongest and most able; the weaker in body, and the feebler in mind, get pushed aside and pass away before their due time by disease and self-destruction.
What can be done? the wheel of progress cannot be stopped because it crushes some victims in its onward course. The abolition of monopolies, and even the reforms of land holding, land conveyance, the refusal of special advantages to primogeniture, and the schemes of trade unionists, now being agitated, cannot do away with poverty. “The poor ye have always with you,” said Jesus, and He no doubt meant, “and always shall have,” in this probationary world. If only the grand principle of “moderation in all things” were more thoroughly followed out to its legitimate conclusion, many deaths due to the extremes which so many strive after, might be avoided; peace, health, and competence should be our aim, not wealth and extravagance; and the waves of commercial depression which so repeatedly occur are but the sequence of commercial exaggeration, and follow upon over-inflated markets.
However various may be the opinions regarding the mental state of suicides, there is no practical dissent from the acknowledgment of the desirability of preventing the commission of suicide.
For our purpose, then, it will suffice to consider, on the one hand, what means are necessary to restrain patients who are acknowledged to be insane; and on the other hand, what measures are permissible to dissuade and prevent those in trouble or pain from taking their own lives; such means will be equally available whether we think these sufferers sane in their deaths, or insane from the time when they attempt the destruction of their lives.
There are doubtless cases of suicide in which it is impossible to decide as to the mental state of the patient; no definition of insanity has ever yet been agreed to, and probably never will; and until medical science has advanced so far as to be able to estimate how much grief or pain a man can support without attempting to evade his sufferings, there always will be voluntary deaths of persons who are so notoriously sane as to forbid the application of restraint. Yet survivors will postulate a momentary insanity, when such persons shall have destroyed themselves to avoid the possibility of an error of judgment.