Is suicide an outcome of a failure?

A young Bollywood actress, Jiah Khan, with her suicide joins the growing list of worldwide celebrities who have killed themselves.

It is sad when a young loses life, it gets worse when the cause of death is a straightforward matter like a man-woman relationship.

Actors in the West have adopted more traumatising ways to kill themselves, a simple Google search revealed. Celebrities have killed their girlfriends, the mother of their newborn and then committed suicide in front of their staff. Many die on a noose, but others have used bullets, alcohol, overdose of medicines, and plunging to death among several other means to end their emotionally painful lives.

The list of actors, who indulge in self-destruction, is quite long. Budding artistes and supermodels join the list very often. Wikipedia, in fact, has an alphabetical list of such cases. These are only the reported cases.

These statistics raise an obvious question. Is the pressure of performance to stay in the limelight too strong that it drives one to depression and suicide?

A debate was thus inevitable. Why do stars commit suicide, and not cricketers and politicians? The emotional stress in these professions is equally acute. Politicians often suffer from public defamation and shame. They are often accused of corruption and are, more often than not, put under media’s negative glare. Cricketers too experience such ‘adulation’, for match-fixing, brawls and politics, and lose their place in the playing eleven, but rarely do they commit suicide.

It can be argued that actors, being a creative breed, often lead high-strung lives. Life in constant public glare adds stress, when their failure is made public. A prolonged emotional stress, lack of hope, extreme stress and abuse are a few cited reasons that push one to the brink.

Whatever the trigger, a final push is shoved when there is prolonged untreated and undetected depression. People totter at the precipice when their condition goes unrecognised and therefore, untreated. Depression causes changes in brain chemistry and suicide can be a very active emotional power that is stubborn and twisted, an emotional agony that is put to an end when people are psychiatrically treated, or take the final step to end their lives.

The writer is an entrepreneur and an educationist.