Mental illness main cause of suicides among rich and poor

Of late we have had cases of people with immense wealth commit suicide in this country .When such things happen one of the questions asked is why, since people associate wealth with fulfilment. Is there a way we could determine that a person is on a suicidal path?

The subject of suicide is very topical particularly in the past few months, in part because a number of people have killed themselves for reasons that remain unclear. For some, death has come in spite of what would seem to be great wealth. And as the argument then goes, there is no reason for such a person to want to die.

In this argument, man opts to die in his own hands because of “problems” the most visible of which is poverty. The opposite view then becomes that if one is no longer poor, then he has “no major problem” and death should be the last thing in his mind!

In his now classic book, Britain on the Couch, Oliver James gives a great deal of evidence and concludes that while advanced capitalism may be good for business, it is bad for mental health. We know that most of the people who kill themselves have poor mental health. We also know that some are extremely rich.

The evidence that money does not buy happiness is overwhelming. Simply put, there is no evidence that accumulation of great wealth at the individual or societal level leads to greater happiness. The evidence is in fact in some cases the other way!

We shall look at three thread of evidence, all leading to the same or similar conclusion.

The holy Bible has several verses that lead to this conclusion. In the book of Ecclesiastics 2:11 we read: “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless a chasing after the wind. Nothing was gained under the sun.”

At the individual level, we must look at a number of men who have killed themselves in the past few years, in spite of securing great wealth. A good example is the financial crunch of 2008, which lead to number of people taking their lives in New York and Tokyo. Although they may have lost some of their wealth, they were by no means poor and it is possible that loss of honour was the greater contribution to their state of desperation.

It seems as though loss of status in society is a greater driver to suicide than poverty as such. A number of studies from India by a well respected scientist – Vivram Patel — would seem to support this basic hypothesis. Among the poor in India, the driver to depression and suicide would seem to be relative as opposed to absolute poverty.

The house of Windsor in the UK, is without doubt one of the richest in the world, and yet the indirect evidence available for their “depression” or at the very least lack of happiness is overwhelming. The fact of their unhappiness is true for those who are born into wealth, as well as the girls who get married into this wealth.

Let me explain. According to Oliver James, three of the queen’s four children are divorced, and the future king, Charles “has made no secret of his personal unhappiness’’. He aspires for a better life! What a contradiction. A man literally born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and who “lives like a king” is so sad! Most would expect him to be the happiest man on earth given his background.

Before her tragic death in Paris in 1997, Princess Diana had lived through hell. She died a miserable person. She had lived with a “cold and uncaring husband, bulimia nervosa and chronic depression”. In this regard, she was no different from many poor women who live in Nairobi and who yearn for love affection from their husbands who drink too much chang’aa!

Wealth did not protect her and neither did it help three generations of the queen’s family! The queen mother is reported to have had a lifelong addiction to cigarettes and chocolates, while the queen herself is said to have had symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder in childhood.

Fergie, also married to the Royal family and found no happiness in the queen’s home. This leads us to conclude that wealth alone does not confer happiness.
Looked at from the broader societal level, one is lead to the same conclusion about wealth and happiness.

For example, the rates of suicide in the UK have increased steadily since 1950, and the rates among the young men have seen the most dramatic rise. Other indicators of lack of social cohesion have also increased. These include violence against the person (think of the recent deaths of young men in Westlands at night, as well as the policemen who kill one another) and Kenya is not spared either. Increase in wealth at the national level does not increase happiness either.

The abuse of drugs and alcohol has seen a dramatic rise all over the world as evidenced in part by the common occurrence of liver diseases associated with alcohol abuse (liver cirrhosis)

At least in Europe and to some extent in Africa, behaviour indicative of emotional problems seems to be on the increase. These include gambling, eating disorder and increase in domestic violence as well as divorce rates.

Overwhelming evidence, therefore, is that more wealth does not mean greater happiness, and depressed people with feeling of hopelessness whether rich or poor tend to kill themselves.