Suicide’s own country,” screams a blogger best summing up the scourge of self-destruction that has been tormenting Kerala for long. From jilted lovers, debt-ridden families, married men and women caught in extramarital flings to gays and schoolchildren, scores of desperate Keralites have found in suicide a convenient ‘escape’ route.

To know how casual suicides have become common, one only needs to read a First Information Report filed at a police station in Palakkad two years ago which was ‘rediscovered’ last year. A 32-year-old youth who was scribbling his suicide note wrote down how potassium cyanide tasted when he found that death had arrived faster than he expected.

He managed to write the word “cyanide is acrid” when he realised that he had accidentally put into his mouth the cap of the pen with which he had stirred a speck of cyanide in alcohol. God’s Own Country has been recording three times the national average of suicides for several years though it did register a marginal decrease in the last couple of years.

Figures with the Kerala State Crime Records Bureau say that suicides have come down from 30.8 persons per one lakh people during 2003 to 29.6 in 2004, 28 in 2005 and 27.4 persons in 2006.

Social scientist PO George who is associated with Maithri Counselling Centre says the figures about suicides are often misleading. There is no data available about those who have failed in their attempts to kill themselves. “It is said that about 10 times as many as those who commit suicide are those who fail in such attempts and continue to live with different degrees of physical, mental and social disabilities,” says he.

As expected, the farming districts of Idukki and Wayanad continue to lead the table with 40.3 and 38 suicides in a lakh of population in 2005 which is now claimed to have come down with the government stepping in with debt relief and loan waiver measures.

Interestingly, the Muslim-dominated Malappuram district has been consistently recording the lowest rate of suicides despite its educational backwardness. Thanal, an NGO recently found in its survey that housewives accounted for 15 per cent of suicides in 2006, followed closely by the unemployed (13.5 pc) and farmers (12.5 pc).

Dowry harassment, the all-encompassing consumerist culture, marital and sexual problems and peer pressure are some of the common reasons cited for the high suicide rate. According to George, if suicides, crime rate and alcohol consumption rate were to be taken as indicators of mental health, Keralites fared very badly. Sociologists also point to the transformation in the family, changes in the educational system, influence of the media, the Gulf boom and women’s employment as factors contributing to suicide.

 “A new trend witnessed in the last few years is the pressure on marital lives thrown up by internet porn and chatting. Unfortunately, women have mostly been at the receiving end of this technological advancement,” says Mrs Eliamma Vijayan, state coordinator of Sakhi, a statewide suicide prevention and counselling centre. Suicide rate among Class X students has been bucked to an extent with the introduction of grading system by the government two years ago. However, Mrs Vijayan alleges that the media continues to glorify incidence of suicides instead of making sincere efforts to downplay them.

Understandably, for psychiatrists, NGOs and counsellors engaged in mental health, it has been a 24 x 7 work with long queues of patients. The State Mental Health Authority has also been pitching in with its 24-hour services.