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Recently, a follower of my column got in touch and told me that the article on suicide prevention three weeks ago was timely because he was actually on the cliff edge. He has been going through depression because of financial crisis.
After the encounter, I sat down and started reflecting. I went through some of the reasons why many people go into depression or commit suicide in Nigeria: economic hardship, examinations failure, being jilted by a lover, infidelity of a spouse, indebtedness, losing a source of livelihood, social isolation or drop in social acceptance.
As I looked at the reasons again, everything sounded so general and familiar; nothing seemed to be peculiar to the few who commit suicide or the larger number who go into depression. A report just told us that 87 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty.
Beyond that mass, there are millions of others struggling to meet up with payment of their children’s school fees. Meeting up with their rent obligation is another big challenge. There are many other recurring and variable costs they have to deal with. Some of these costs like electricity bills (where there are no pre-paid meters) are outside their control. Some of these people actually have worse financial crises than those committing suicide, yet they continue to hang in there.
Many adults today failed one examination or the other in their school days. In the 60s and 70s, getting into secondary school was a tug of war. University education was something else. Many failed multiple times before they finally succeeded. Today, they are chief executives and men and women of means in various aspects of life. Yet some children commit suicide these days, due to peer pressure or poor management of the situation by their parents/guardians, when they fail WAEC or JAMB exam.
Being jilted or rejected is part of bachelorhood and spinsterhood. You get rejected due to your ethnicity, background, financial status, physical features and sometimes inexplicable reasons. It is shattering. But after the storm comes calm; in spite of all the heartbreaks of the past, many of us still dey. We have since moved on, met people who accepted us for who we are and settled down to family life. Yet some people took and still take their lives for the same reason.
A corollary of being jilted is infidelity. A report sometime ago said over 50 per cent of married men and women in Nigeria either cheat or have cheated on their spouse at some point. Infidelity must be very painful, shattering and humiliating for the other spouse, but these married people are still there somehow. One woman told me some time ago that she just found out that her husband has impregnated a woman outside. She is obviously going through a patch in her marriage, but suicide is not an option. Yet husbands and wives have committed suicide on discovery of infidelity on the part of their spouses.
Suicide due to indebtedness is common. All that some of these debtors see is despondency. They see no way out except suicide. Unknown to some of these people, indebtedness is a general disease. The debts they are killing themselves over are peanuts compared to what some others owe. What caused the collapse of some of these financial institutions? Is it not toxic debts running into hundreds of billions? No be human beings borrow the money? Dem don commit suicide? You have an obligation to pay your debts, but always remember that you have to be alive first before you can repay your debt, so take it easy before worries about indebtedness snuff the life out of you via suicide, stroke or heart attack
Failure, they say, is an orphan, and success has many siblings, relatives and friends. Shortly after he lost the 2015 elections, former President Goodluck Jonathan cried out that his friends had deserted him. He was still the sitting president, yet his “friends” had moved on. Anybody, who has occupied a position of authority, suffers the same fate after he leaves the position. A retired chief executive shared his experience with me. As CEO, he got tens of hampers during Christmas. His home, office, everywhere would be filled with hampers of various shapes, sizes and contents. These days, he counts himself lucky if he gets two hampers at Christmas.
Many people get carried away by appointments and do not distinguish between friends of the position they hold and their personal friends. Often, they abandon their personal friends for the friends of the position. By the time they leave the position, friends of the position move on to the new occupant of the position. Very few friends of the position, if any, transit to personal friends. That is why many people become lonely after retirement or at the expiration of their tenure. The friends of position have moved on and they are too ashamed to go back to the personal friends they abandoned while in office.
After reviewing some of the reasons why some people commit suicide, I began to take a closer look at the power of the mind. You know, one of the very important pieces of advice they give to people suffering from depression or developing suicidal tendencies is to get external help from professionals, and close family and friends. But you also need personal help. You need to develop your mind and guard it jealously. A positive mindset is a powerful weapon against depression and suicide. Also be in firm control of your mind. Whoever controls your mind controls your life, so do not cede that responsibility to anybody. Some people can be very mean and merciless and can destroy you through the control of your mind. I will always love humanity, but I remain wary of certain human beings.
In addition, a developed mind knows how to break down problems or challenges. No human being can carry an adult elephant on his head. That is what many of our problems look like. But if you cut the adult elephant into bits, you can carry everything over time. Once you break down the situation, it does not look as insurmountable as it initially looked. What you now need is patience, perseverance and some skills to navigate through.
Finally, if we have our way, we all would want to change something about us. We all crave to have more or less of something: money, looks, intelligence, wisdom, height, complexion, even size of penis, breast, bum, etc. Anybody who disputes this fact is a hypocrite. But some of these things we crave for are outside our control. So what do you do? You accept and get used to what you have and it takes a powerful mind to do that. Quote me, many of the “happy” or “successful” people you see out there are dealing with one insecurity or the other. It takes a powerful mind to conquer or deal with your insecurities. When all is done, it is just a state of your mind really.