A well-known Chinese calligrapher and an active member of his community in Johore Bahru ended his life by slashing his wrist. His family members revealed hints of his problem with loan sharks.

This unfortunate gentleman is not the first suicide related to loan sharking, and neither will he be the last in a seemingly endless chain of such human tragedies. Newspaper reports of such self-killings are frequent. Yet, behind the inane and by now familiar headlines, one can only imagine the private hell of the victims in the last lingering months and days of their lives.

Suddenly, I am aware of such regular news reports of suicide, sometimes appearing on a daily basis. They have become a permanent fixture of our public landscape, along with the murders, the fatal road accidents, the gang fights, and public complaints about the police.

Nevertheless, nobody wants to talk about it much. In general, death and dying are not the most popular subjects for discussion with Malaysians. The living are too busy with the stressful business of living, and the dead have nothing to say. In short, people are embarrassed about people having to die by their own hands.

But reports of suicides tug at the heart-strings of readers. The manners of suicide are dramatic and varied for one thing. Leaping from a height, even from the illustrious Penang Bridge, is relatively rare. So is death by an overdose of sleeping pills. In contrast, hanging and wrist-slashing are more popular. Lately, people have discovered the painlessness of dying from the inhalation of carbon monoxide, by connecting a hose from the exhaust pipe of a car to the enclosed space within.

After the event, reporters venture all kinds of speculations about why the deceased has chosen to end their own lives... A cursory look into a psychology reference book would give you an inventory of motives on why people kill themselves. But we do not need an expert to tell us why they do so, for many, if not all of us, are not exempt from an occasional toying with the idea of ending our lives.

Of course, according to the mad-cap philosopher Nietzsche, the IDEA of suicide is a comforting thought it can get you through many a sleepless night! On the other hand, Albert Camus did begin his book The Myth of Sisyphus by declaring that there is only one important question in philosophy, and that is whether to commit suicide or not.

Camus' purpose was to compel people to think about the meaning of life. Indeed, if there is no meaning to our existence, then why live on?

Rational deliberation

Generally though, people do not care about the meaning of life, as much as they care about where they are going to dine that evening. The suicides we read about probably have nothing to do with philosophers' concern, or if they do, it is by way of a tangential inadvertent afterthought.

But, by all accounts, human beings are the only creatures on Earth that can commit suicide as a result of rational deliberation... The fact that we do toy with the idea can be explained in many ways. Freud characterises this tendency as the death-wish latent in all humans. The God of Death Thanatos vies with the God of Life Eros in every human being in a constant struggle for supremacy. Often, they find manifestation in smoking, which is the surest and most pleasurable form of suicide.

Just because the idea of suicide is pretty universally human, beneath the public silence in the public sphere, readers of news reports of a suicide invariably feels instantly a quiet pang of regret for the actor-cum-victim of such a gruesome act. Call it empathy if you like. You get this weird feeling that it could have been "me".

That is why, Sigmund Freud not withstanding, people instinctively know why certain individuals commit suicide. The reasons are varied and familiar. Any kind of financial crisis engenders such a thought. Bankruptcy, indebtedness, and sudden unemployment are often powerful catalysts. In a society that increasingly equates personal worth with financial worth, nothing deprives the will to live more than the stripping of one's financial security.

Then again, in an increasingly impersonal urbanised world, the only anchor for one's lonely floating self is the family, or the complex of personal relations that comforts or assuages the isolated Self. The death of a loved one, a divorce, or a family break-up are all felt in the unconscious recesses of the heart as a betrayal against the Self. One's universe is torn asunder, and the sky collapses in one fell swoop.

Then again, ageing, loneliness and the prospect of a prolonged painful conglomeration of terminal diseases are a dangerous cocktail. We are a young nation, and the young live as if they will never grow old, as if they will be pink with good health forever. It would seem that sickness and death will happen to other people always. I seriously doubt if any of our youth is prepared for their doctor's pronouncement that they will be dead in three long painful undignified years from cancer or something.

Well, dying and death are pretty private affairs. It is one of the very few things that nobody can do for you. Still, in a world where the private universe is diminishing in the face of public encroachment, even dying or any particular mode of dying can become a public issue.

Suicide statistics

According to figures released by the Health Ministry, 2004 people committed suicide last year. That works out to an average figure of seven suicide cases per day. Obviously, the incidents have been on the rise for some time, and it has reached an alarming stage. Even the World Health Organisation has warned that suicide is threatening to become the second killer by the year 2020, after heart diseases.

People working in the health sector would like to look at the phenomenon of suicide medically, as a sign of declining psychological well-being of course. We know that standard analysis. Suicidal tendencies are caused by manic depression, clinical insomnia, and stress-related disorder. They treat it like a disease, and like treating all diseases, they recommend all kinds of cure and relief, chief among which is to seek help from counsellors and psychiatrists, a prescription about which I have deep misgivings.

The problem with psychology and psychiatry is the legitimacy in fixing the norm, by which standards anomalies and psychosis are determined. The sciences of psychology and psychiatry though they seem to work quite well are founded on epistemological presuppositions that beg to be debated.

I prefer Camus' way of looking at suicide though. Human beings can only live in a familiar world in which they inhabit. They call it home. If this home is less than perfect, they always have the original Home in the hereafter to comfort them. An imperfect home is still a home of sort, and therefore, habitable.

It is only when the home has become totally absurd, and devoid of comprehensibility that one finds the habitat intolerable. Anything is better than this, you say, even the nothingness of non-being. There, the dark logic of the heart works its black magic. You begin to survey that various avenues of escape from this life.

Yet you still hesitate, because the impulse of Eros is a powerful force. Invariably, people who are contemplating and planning their own death send out signals of their intent, issuing plaintive cry for help in effect.

Thank God for religion

Here, people pay for the ultimate price of economic progress through industrialisation, modernisation and urbanisation. The alienation unimaginable when Malaysia was still a serene community-based agrarian land is now the order of the day. The extended family has virtually disappeared in the cities.

Divorce is on the rise, threatening even the nuclear family, and producing an army of single-parent families. We have indeed arrived at the age of Existentialist Angst, where in Satrean strain of thought - Hell is other people and everyone is an amateur at this business of being lonely.

In a world where most people survive on the posture that they are the meanest son-of-a-b. in the whole damned Valley of Shadow of Death, any plaintive cry for help would not find a single echo from the entire valley. The nihilistic silent isolation is complete and total.

Fortunately, religion is a pretty big thing in Malaysia. Where the promise of justice and happiness in the hereafter is not sufficient to stem out the thought of suicide, the menace of eternal damnation that comes with suicide does impede the impulse to end it all somewhat.

Even so, the rising tide of suicide cases is a tell-tale sign that all is not well in Malaysia. The causes cannot merely be analysed in mere medical terms. There must be deep-seated social factors at work. If nothing else, it does indicate a deep bottomless chasm between the essence and the existence of many individuals. The scar of social and personal alienation runs deep indeed. Ours is very much the landscape of Eliot's wasteland.