Suicide as a means of relief from pain and disease is common in Bengal; the sacred books named the Shastras inculcate the doctrine of its propriety in such cases. In former times these deaths took place with public ceremonials, but are now perforce privately completed. Intestinal worms seem to produce great physical pain and discomfort among the poor rice-eating Bengalese, and suicide is not infrequent from this cause.─Woodford.
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.