THE DEATH OF JOY: WHAT COULD WE HAVE DONE TO STOP HER?ARQUERO, John Vincent A.BS PsychologyABSTRACTAccording to the World Health Organization fact sheet (WHO, 2015 ), there are near to 800,000 individual deaths recorded annually because of suicide around the globe. Furthermore, their statistics claim that suicide is the second leading cause of death among the youth aged 15-29.
With this information and with actual cases happening in our society, suicide is thus considered a public health issue that needs to be addressed. In this study, the researcher focused on two cases of suicide. First is the case of Joy, a 15 year-old girl who committed suicide. Using Descriptive-Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (case study as a research method), the researcher will conduct an in-depth examination on the lived experience of the significant people left behind by Joy. The researcher (in his adviser’s assistance) will be conducting an interview with Joy’s immediate social circle trying to find out what – for them – led her to developing a suicide ideation, what are the premises of her suicide attempt, what could’ve been done to prevent her death and what could others possibly do to prevent another death like hers in the future. On the other hand, Keywords: suicide, suicide ideation, suicide attempt, suicide preventionINTRODUCTIONSuicide is generally defined as the act of taking away one’s own life as a result of depression or any other mental illness.
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Basically, it includes planning out and acting upon the irrational thought caused by overwhelming stress and tension which leads to a fatal extent of self-destruction. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2015), almost 800,000 people die by suicide every year which corresponds to one death per 40 second. And yet, there are even more non-fatal or unsuccessful suicide attempts that occur worldwide, thus considering it one of the major public health issues in the world. Suicide does not just occur at any specific age bracket; it has been found, however, to be the second leading cause of death for youth, 15-29 years old, in 2016. Accordingly, this global phenomenon happens not only in the rich countries but more so in the low- and middle-income countries where 79% of the total global suicide cases occur. One of the third-world countries with rampant cases of suicide is the Philippines.
The Philippines is the third among the countries in the world to have the biggest population of Catholics and it is the only predominately Catholic country in Asia. As widely known, the Catholic Church has been one of the global institutions that condemn taking away human life in any means possible. It was only after 1965, when the Second Vatican Pastoral Council (Vatican II) has been promulgated, that the Church opened its understanding on the cases of suicide deaths.
But social prejudice regarding this issue has not been dismissed yet. This is one of the reasons why there are still many undocumented cases of suicide most especially in this country. In 1993, WHO reported a suicide rate of 2.5 for males and 1.7 for females over 100,000 populations in the Philippines. However, according to Statista (a crude statistic website), the general statistics for suicide cases increased to 2.
6 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants as the new millennium entered in 2000. Consequently, this number continued increasing to 2.9 up to 3.
8 in years 2005 and 2010 respectively. The most recent data shows a decreased number to 3.4 in 2015. This means that in this country with over 100million population, a rate of 3.
4 per 100,000 is equivalent to 3400 Filipino suicide death for that specific time frame. brief discussion of Albay statistics on suicide…Many researches have been conducted about suicide. One of the pioneer studies was that of French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim in 1897. H e wanted to examine what are the commonalities between the social characteristics of suicide victims as well as the social patterns in the premise of suicide so as to determine where and when the cases of this issue is most prevalent.
He enumerated different kinds of suicide such as egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide, anomic suicide, and fatalistic suicide. Later on in his study, he developed his definition of suicide as all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.E. David Klonsky and Alexis M. May (2015) of the University of British Columbia developed the Three-Step Theory (3ST) which is a theory of suicide rooted in the “Ideation-to-Action” framework. This theory states that (a) suicide ideation is caused by a person’s experience of extreme pain and hopelessness; (b) connectedness is an important factor to prevent the increased possibilities of developing suicide ideation for people experiencing both pain and hopelessness; and (c) progression from suicidal ideation to attempt is hastened by the person’s capability to carry out suicide. present theoriesFor every case, there will always be grieving family members, relatives, friends, and other colleagues of a suicide victim that will be left behind with the challenge of trying to cope up and make sense of their loss.
These ‘survivors’ will be filled with lasting regrets as to what they could have done to stop the victim from committing suicide.Recently, a fifteen-year-old teen committed suicide inside the safe walls of their home. She will be referred to as Joy in this research for reasons of confidentiality. Many of her classmates, teachers and others who know her are shocked as to why she would commit such a grave decision in her life. They, like others in the same situation, are left with the regrets of whether what possible measures could they have done to prevent the performed outcome.
Thus, the title “The death of Joy: What could we have done to stop her?” came out from whose premise revolve around the literal expiration of the subject, Joy, and at the same time referring to the cessation in the joy of living in this world. Additionally, it includes the usual words of regret from every significant people left behind questioning what they could have done to stop the victim from taking away her own precious life.In 2017, Christopher James Bowden from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand conducted a similar study entitled Silence After Suicide: A Phenomenological Study of Young Men’s Experience of Losing A Close Male Friend.
In this study, Statement of the ProblemThis study primarily aims to answer the following questions:1. What, for the significant people in Joy’s life, could have been the factors that led to her immediate suicide?2. What are the lived experience of Joy’s significant others before and after her suicide?3. Learning from the case of Joy, what could possibly be done to prevent another case of suicide in the future?conceptual frameworkMETHODSThis study is qualitative in nature.
It will use a descriptive-interpretative phenomenological analysis inquiry. This type of Interview of the respondents will be audio recorded and transcribed for an in-depth analysis of their responses.
