Why do young millennials commit suicide?
There are myriads of causes but they aren’t reasons. It is never reasonable to take one's life. But nowadays, here in the Philippines, it’s becoming like an epidemic of sorts, an upsurge or an unusual rise in teenage and young adult suicides. I have heard that the provincial governor of Cebu was alarmed at the frequency of young people jumping from the two bridges that connect Mandaue City and Lapu-Lapu City. She reportedly banned motorcycle and bicycle riders from passing through the two bridges. I am not a psychologist or any kind of psycho-social analyst, and I cannot really comprehend what is the correlative relation between suicides and biking, but I do appreciate any action on the part of government to call attention to and help address the problem.
This is not unique to the Philippines but a world-wide phenomenon, where six young Filipinos die each day due to suicide, out of a population of 105 million. This year, 2019, for every 100,000 nationals, 31.9 people commit suicide every day. In Russia, it is 31, and in Guyana, 29.2; in South Korea 26.9. It is 26.1 in Belarus, 22 in Surinam and also 22 in Kazakhstan. It is 20.7 in Belgium and 19.6 in Japan. In the Philippines, it is only 2.5 for men and 1.7 for women. A specific Philippine study was conducted on 8,761 individuals who are in Grades 7 to 9. Out of them, 11.6% among those aged 13 and 14 admitted that they have considered suicide. The same study also indicated that 16.8% among those aged 15 to 17 actually attempted suicide. Health and local government authorities have voiced alarm over the rising incidence of self-inflicted harm, injury, and death in our country in the last five years.
Our own study and analysis indicates two-fold cause to this phenomenon; internal and external. The internal causes are driven by an individual's lack of defense mechanisms against external stimuli. Most of our millennials lack sufficient pain and tolerance capacity. They cannot tolerate too much pressure, problems, and pain arising from physical, emotional, psychological problems. The external factors are those outside the individuals. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, lack of decent surroundings, and inadequate basic needs like foods, shelter, clothing, medicine, and other physical requirements do push young people to harm themselves as a way of escape from all the pain. Broken homes and shattered marriages of parents, conflicts and troubles in the family, and lack of moral and spiritual support system also push them to suicide.
The outward labor migration of fathers and mothers, leaving the family and home is leaving hundreds of thousands of children virtually orphaned and deprived of paternal and maternal care, affection, and guidance. They develop a recurrent need for self-confidence, they are led into depression, anxiety, and anguish driven by too much loneliness. In schools, many of them are bullied, in the community they are either ignored or excluded from mainstream interactions and activities. They don’t have enough support systems. They turn to drugs, petty crimes, and graduate into more complicated forms of truancy and delinquencies. The girls suffer teenage pregnancy, the boys become drug-dependent. All these are strong driving forces culminate to self-harm and suicide.
Suicides among teenagers and young adults are symptoms of a greater social cancer or malady, the decaying moral and cultural values of the people. They are strong evidence of the shared failures among the institutions of the family, the school, the church and the mass media. We are all guilty and we should do something positive and immediate to save our young from self-inflicted death, disease, or injuries. It is our duty and our responsibility to do so.
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