Psychologist Dr Faith Harding has expressed grave concern over the number of suicides and attempted suicides among young people, and she has attributed the problem partly to them living life too quickly and becoming bored by the time they are in their late teens.
“You would have four in every five children thinking about suicide and one or more may attempt. I really don’t have the statistics or data for Guyana and I don’t know if they are collected, but it is not available. But I suspect from the numbers of the children I see I would say one in every ten or more attempted,” Dr Harding revealed to Sunday Stabroek in a recent interview.
She said she sees young people on a daily basis who are very troubled and who feel that the only alternative is for them to take their own lives, and she called for interventions to stem this problem.
Dr Harding said she is extremely troubled by the cutting and body mutilation by young people who attempt to take their own lives and the fear that they have. She said when she can see a young woman whose stomach is totally scarred or another whose hand is badly damaged due to self-inflicted injuries there is a serious problem.
“Body mutilation to the extent where they are bleeding and they still cannot get over their fear or hurt – that is worrying,” she said.
She is also troubled with the vulgarity that goes along with it, as she noted there are families who are considered fairly decent who curse each other in the most vulgar manner. She said the children would talk to their parents using profanities which she said is very frightening.
“Our young people seem to be traumatised without any kind of assistance; they are not talking to their parents,” Dr Harding said.
‘Look for themselves’
She explained that from the time young people are between the ages of 11 and 13 they begin to ‘look for themselves’ as they want an identity, but during that process they get mixed messages as they are experiencing the hormonal changes of becoming a young lady or man.
“So there is confusion, there is sexual confusion as well, and depending on the experiences they have had they can decide whether they want to be homosexual or heterosexual as at that age they begin to explore and one has to very careful with the experiences that they have,” she said.
She said the kind of parenting exercised during this period is very critical, as this is the age when young people put themselves at risk, and a lower performance is seen in school from just around 12-years-old.
But she said they pick up as the hormones begin to get balanced and the child sees who he or she is.
He said it is during this period also that children realise that not everything they thought their parents were is necessarily the case, or what society is either.
“It is when they would find out their parents have multiple relationships when they thought it was just a father and a mother, and they begin to realise that things don’t seem to be the same as the reality of what they are being taught at home.”
According to Dr Harding some children get so disappointed that they begin to lose communication with their parents, and by 16 they don’t want to have conversations with them. It is not always because they are disappointed but sometimes they feel that their parents don’t understand or listen to them.
The children sometimes charge that the parents always criticize them or are judgmental, or on the other side of the coin they are just laid back and allow them to do whatever they want. The latter children most times have a lot of money at their disposal and attract many so-called friends and they have a lot of peer pressure and would perform to suit the norm.
“They get very bored and after a while they are disappointed that life was not what they expected it to be,” Dr Harding said.
She said from 16 through to 19 sees the formation of friendships which sometimes can lead to marriage later, and then there may be a lot of difficulties with parenting as young people want to explore. Some may become depressed about who they are if they do not meet the ideal boy or girl and others may try extreme or risky things to gain the attention of the opposite sex.
Dr Harding said those kinds of disappointments lead to depression which leads to suicidal thoughts and some are successful while others harm their bodies.
And sometimes the child’s action can lead to them being placed in an environment that exposes them sexually.
“When you have a 15 or 14-year-old locked up in the circumstances that we have at La Penitence, it is abhorrent to my mind based on what I see happening there,” Dr Harding commented.
She mentioned the case of a young teenager who was locked up at the East La Penitence Police Station who did not want to leave the lock-ups because she had formed a relationship with a woman in there.
“And they were actually having sex in that lock-ups in front of everybody else; everything was going on in there,” Dr Harding said, adding that the child was at the time a student of one of the country’s top high schools.
When the child was eventually released she began to recr-uit other young women in the school and to visit the woman’s home with them.
“Then there was a five or six-year-old in the house and the sister started recruiting her so that this seems to be a very obvious activity that is sexual abuse and child sexual abuse and it is going on before our very eyes,” a troubled Dr Harding said.
Asked what could be done to address this societal problem Dr Harding suggested rallies and street theatres dealing with the issue, coupled with workshops in schools dealing with the wide spectrum of problems children face.
She said two or three schools can come together and train some students who will return to speak to children and do peer counselling.
Family circle
Dr Harding said that while in the past children had problems the family circle was more close knit than now, and secondly there were more homes with both parents than there are now.
“It was more community childcare; children were brought up by a community and not by a family alone as everybody was looking out,” she recalled.
She said children in her days must have thought about suicide, since it is a developmental issue, but the difference is the thoughts were seldom translated into action. She said now there are communities where there is a suicide or attempted suicide every other week.
And there is the fact that children are more exposed to the world through television and mobile phones than they were, and sometimes they copy what they see. The psychologist said that she was very disturbed over Russian Roulette sung by singing sensation Rihanna. According to her shortly after the song was released there were two reported “significant suicides” and the persons were known to have been Rihanna fans.
And while she does not have enough evidence, Dr Harding said there seems to be multiple suicides or suicide attempts occurring across generations in one family.
“I have had cases where a mother attempted about ten times and then the last one was successful,” she said, and she does not know if the woman was given the psychological help that she needed.
She admitted that there are not many psychologists in Guyana and many persons are unable to pay for their services, even though she would many times reduce her price to accommodate persons in need of help.
“It is a very tough field to be in; it costs a lot to be trained as a psychologist and it takes a toll on you as well personally, because what you are doing is a lot of empathizing; you are understanding people’s problems and it is a lot of sadness,” she said.
And many people who were sexually molested as children are the ones who would attempt suicide and it does not have to do with whether they are professionals or not.
“You have people who are in key positions who would have attempted suicide many times and one day it just might work,” she said.
Four years ago
For a mother who lost her 22-year-old son to suicide almost four years ago, she still cannot pinpoint what could have triggered her son’s downward spiral into depression which led to drug abuse and tragically to his death.
She told the Sunday Stabroek she still remembers that December 2008 day when her son died, and she many times questions her role as a parent and wondered if it played any part in his death. He was the last of five children and had gone to neighbouring Trinidad to look for a better life. His mother said because he was illegal he was being paid low wages and this frustrated him, but he later turned to selling music from a push cart and was doing well.
“I don’t know what it was, but he became depressed and he started using drugs and became very sick and I had to go to Trinidad to get him,” the woman recalled.
She said she was expected to bring him back to Guyana in two weeks but he reported to the immigration in Trinidad on his own and was promptly deported. What might have done him more harm than good was him being arrested at Timehri airport and accused of being the notorious, now dead, Rondel ‘Fineman’ Rawlins.
“My son was arrested as soon as he come to Guyana. In fact the police were there waiting for him and in truth he had locks and when you looked at him sideways he looked like Fineman,” Harding recalled.
She said her son was kept in the lock-ups for more than 72 hours, even though his father and sister took his birth certificate to the authorities to prove he was not Fineman. She returned to Guyana and fought for her son’s release and even after he was released he had to report to an East Coast station every week until one day Dr Harding said she refused to take him since he had done nothing wrong.
“Things just get worse and worse and he kept smoking and I would carry him to Dr Bhiro Harry at the Georgetown Hospital and once he tell me don’t take him back, and I did not,” she said.
The day he ingested a poisonous substance he acted normally, and had just finished having a conversation with her when he went out and later came back and told her what he had done.
He was rushed to the Georgetown hospital and the doctor informed his mother that if he lived past 14 days he had a chance, but sadly he died on the 14th day. She said the day he died was the day she decided not to visit him early in the morning, and she is haunted by this up to now as she felt he could have died in her arms.
“I remember him every day; he was a beautiful son; all his sisters and brother liked him and he was different from the rest, just loving and would always help. Even when he was sick, sometimes we would go out and when we came back he would clean up and fix up the house,” she said.
