JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARK

JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARK Addressing the Issue of Suicide A LMOST every day, there are reports of people committing suicide all around the globe. Close to 800,000 people die by suicide every year. The primary cause of suicides is linked to stress and depression although other reasons reported include failure and loss, phobias, frustration, conflict with others, violence, loneliness, abuse, discrimination, a relationship break-up, financial problems, chronic pain and illness, etc. Even many acclaimed and Successful people have taken their lives out of sheer frustration and depression. Earnest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning author committed suicide in 1961. Arthur Koestler, the famous British writer and thinker, committed suicide along with his wife, Cynthia, in his London home in March 1983. At the time of his death, he was 77 years of age. Why should a man who had everything that one could wish for in this world commit suicide? Mr Koestler had won renown as a scholar and writer, and had acquired sufficient wealth to leave £400,000 to a British University for research in parapsychology. The reason for his suicide was his overwhelming sense of horror and frustration at the evil being perpetrated in the world all around him—feelings which were reflected in the many books he wrote. In his famous Darkness at Noon (published in 32 languages), he excoriates the so-called ‘people’s system of the Soviet Union, which perpetuates all the cruelty and exploitation which it was supposed to eradicate.’ In a collection of his discourses published in 1974, he puts his finger on the crux of the matter: “There is a striking, symptomatic disparity between the growth curves of technological achievement on the one hand and of ethical behaviour on the other.” He subsequently expresses his disillusionment with modern civilization when he writes: “We can control the motions of the satellites orbiting distant planets, but we cannot control the situation in Northern Ireland.” Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910), regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time, considered suicide the only option for him at the time when he was considered as a completely happy and successful man. He writes about his views quite graphically on this issue. “My question, the question that had brought me to the edge of suicide when I was fifty years old, was the simplest question lying in the soul