Alarming Rise In Suicides In Goa By Fr Desmond de Sousa CSsR, SAR NEWS
PANAJI, Goa (SAR NEWS) -- On Friday March 18, the charred bodies of three siblings, sisters Libania Fernandes (30), and Terezinha Fernandes (28) and their brother Felix Fernandes (25) were laid to rest in the cemetery of Guardian Angel Church, in the mining town of Curchorem, south Goa. They had committed suicide by setting themselves ablaze in their house when their mother was away at her sister’s place for two weeks. According to the local police, the cause for the suicides was the expenses of three court cases related to property filed by their father Salis, which the siblings were handling. They had to pay the lawyer Rs. 800 for each hearing. Suicides and suicide attempts are shooting up alarmingly in the predominantly Catholic Goa state on the east coast of India. According to senior psychiatrist of Goa Directorate of Health Services, Dr. Rajesh Dhume, the problem of suicides must be tackled much earlier in the family and educational institutions. “Society in Goa has changed rapidly. Joint families offered some protection to children, but with many opting for nuclear families, this kind of protection has disappeared. In many cases, both parents work and there is no interaction with the children and no emotional bonding. The child feels lonely.” “The competitive nature of education has changed from what it used to be,” he says. “In the past, competition was healthy. Now, the aspirations of parents are too heavy for the children to handle. They set goals for their child without knowing what their child is capable of. You cannot guarantee success even after completing professional education,” he declares. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 2,320 people had committed suicide in India in the year 2000. Out of these 206 had taken their lives in Tamil Nadu due to failure in examinations. Psychiatrists hold mothers mostly responsible for the high level of anxiety and stress faced by the children to perform well in examinations. Young educated mothers, in their anxiety to ensure that their children come out with flying colours in this competitive world, set high and unrealistic targets for them, according to Dr S. Nambi, president of the Indian Psychiatric Society. No such statistics are available about Goa, but there is good reason to believe that similar reasons prevail. Dr. Dhume highlighted the need for “each school to have a trained counsellor who can tackle the problem in the student before it magnifies.” He further emphasised the need for providing value education to the students in Goa. “Our students have no value systems,” he observed. “Children are not taught to deal with life issues.” But often students do not take value education seriously in institutions, but rather perceive it as a free period. “The problem is that there is no glamour associated with this subject. It is for the teacher to make it interesting. Value education is imperative because society has changed so rapidly,” says Dr. Dhume. A student counsellor considers the lack of role models for stress management at home in their formative years as a very critical reason for many young people failing to adapt to the demands of stress. “If a child were to see either of their parents react violently or negatively to stress, that is the lesson they are going to learn for life.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Frederick Noronha 784 Near Convent, Sonarbhat SALIGAO GOA India Freelance Journalist TEL: +91-832-2409490 MOBILE: 9822122436 http://fn.swiki.net http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks fred at bytesforall.org http://www.bytesforall.org
