While the festive season is traditionally a time of happiness and spending time with family, a number of families in Ikageng have recently lost their loved ones to suicide.
Dr Elsabé Peters, a clinical psychologist from NWU explains that the incidence of suicide tends to rise in spring. ‘When the whole environment comes to life again, the depressed person feels “left behind” in sadness.
Suggestion: The brightest light casts the darkest shadow – contrast between others’ happiness and your own pain.
It also rises over the festive season when people’s spending time with friends amplifies a depressed person’s sense of loneliness or loss.
Const. Kelebogile Trom, SAPS spokesperson confirmed that suicide incidents and inquest cases have recently been opened at the Ikageng police station. One was a 9-year-old boy who was found dead after hanging from a tree in Baipei, Promosa on 10 November.
The other inquest case is of a 31-year-old man who was found hanging from a roof of his shack on 1 October. She says there are other unconfirmed reports of three people in the past three months who drank brake fluid in an attempt to commit suicide. Only one of them died from the toxic fluid.
Peters says the signs of depression include:
• A lack of enjoyment of life
• More bad than good days per week
• A change in eating patterns
• A change in sleeping patterns
• A lack of energy, which may seem to improve just before the suicide attempt
• Spending a lot of time thinking about suicide, whether verbalising these thoughts or not.
She says previous suicide attempts are a huge risk factor if the depression hasn’t been addressed medically. Other warning signs are people who start withdrawing from friends and family or who start saying goodbyes or give away special belongings to others.
The person at risk may start gathering the means to commit suicide, for example, a lot of pills or having access to a firearm or searching for a piece of hosepipe to gas themselves. He or she may start researching the topic of suicide on the internet. Statistics show that men tend to have more lethal attempts than women and the latest research indicates that a history of a head injury or severe concussion is linked to suicidal thoughts or actions.
For help, contact The South African Depression and Anxiety Group on 0800 567 567. To contact a counsellor between 8am-8pm, Monday to Sunday,
call 011 234 4837.
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