Student suicide: Watching for the red flags

As providers and caretakers, adults tend to view the world of their children as all happy and carefree. After all, children don’t have jobs to keep or bills to pay, so what could they possibly have to worry about?

Even as we ponder over this, the reality is closer to us than many parents and caregivers would want to believe.

This is because most want to believe that children cannot be affected by stress and depression for they don’t have to deal with workmates, bosses or workloads.

According to Monica Mucheru, a counselling psychologist at Kivuli Centre on Ngong Road, these emotions are affecting children now more than in the past owing to the fact that there are high demands on them to perform well and be the best, even as the strands that hold society together are crumbling.

“Before it reaches the point where a child begins thinking of suicide, depression is preceded by a rollercoaster of emotions instigated by stress in an ascending stream of feelings and tension,” says Monica.

unknown reasons

This past one month, six university students have been reported to have committed suicide. The tradgedy that befell  Pamela Bii last Tuesday is not peculiar to her family alone.

On the eventful day, Pamela came home in the evening and found Brian Kimutai, a Second Year and 21-year-old student at USIU dangling with his father’s tie looped around his neck. The student had insinuated that he didn’t like the hostel where he was residing  because he didn’t like ‘what was happening there’.

It is difficult to discern ‘what was happening there’, but Kimutai’s parents recognise that some underlying stress factors played part in their son committing suicide.

To many, an adult being diagnosed with stress sounds relatively understandable, but for a young and older child to go through the same is unfathomable. However, Monica says stress and depression are conditions that affect anybody with a functioning mind. But parents forget that children deal with classmates (who might be bullies) and teachers, the pressure to keep up with expectations of society keep mounting.

After last year’s KCPE results were announced, several pupils, one as young as 12 years, who sat the exams committed suicide while some left home never to be traced again.

“At school they are given assignments and competition to be the best appraised learner is taut. In the house there are times they become daddy’s favourite or mom’s best,” says Monica. “When dynamics change and they are no longer held in those regards, they ask why, and maybe get worried sick,” says Monica.

*Fredrick and Joyce Magana were parents to a young girl and two boys.

Their first born boy sadly left both school and home three years ago and has never been traced to date.

Their son *Michael James was a Second Year student at a local university’s School of Medicine when he mysteriously went missing. His close confidants said his performance had declined. The day he left, he confided in a friend that he was tired of living a lie.

Though he was a brilliant student through his school years, his life in college was faltering. Fredrick and Joyce regret why they pushed him to pursue that career, which should have been a natural choice for him having performed well in sciences.

“We are not certain what transpired to the point that he left, but we know things would’ve been different had we let him decide his own career path,” Joyce says.

Susan Moenga, on the other hand, just graduated from university. She gives an idea of what may be the cause of the current turn of events at universities.

“At school you face pressures of performing well for your parents approval. A girl might be having difficulties with her social life as well — especially in her teenage years, but they feel afraid of talking things out,” she explains.

 “At times you want to talk to your parents; tell them about your problems and what you are facing. But you can’t because they will probably react negatively,” she says.

Hellen Wangeci, a working mother with teenage girls and boys, says; “It’s painful what parents experience when a child goes berserk. Parents and children need to establish a bond that allows them to talk and analyse issues.

“It’s difficult to understand what your child is going through. Girls and boys at times go haywire and as a parent you are naïve and know not how to handle the issue. At teenagehood, they are overtly hormonal and this gets them on an uncontrollable spiral,” states Hellen.

Monica says, often, when a child is stressed, it goes unnoticed since their realm of life does not involve mundane activities associated with adults.

Today, due to the repercussions they hold and the expression they emblazon on children’s lives, more light has been shed on the conditions and evidenced information unearthed.

According to medicinenet.com, stress occurs when forces from the outside world impinge on an individual: It is a normal physical response to events that upset your balance in some way. Depression though, is an illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts and affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way they think about their surroundings.

pressure to perform

“Children are supposed to be close to their parents. Parents should maintain a friendship that provides a leeway to bring out nagging problems anybody in the family unit is facing,” Monica adds.

However, chances are that many children’s issues are being ignored while at the same time parents demand that they deliver academically and stay at par with a neighbour’s child. This piles pressure on them.

It is ludicrous when a child tells you as a parent that they are stressed or depressed. We never take notice until life is lost: That’s when what should have clicked way back becomes audible in our minds.

An efficacious solution can be opted for to stem a child’s path to destruction and it is proper that parents learn how to care for a child showing signs of stress or depression, says Monica.

The first sign to watch out for is an instant change in behaviour.

Monica adds that children have different capabilities and talents and parents should, therefore, complement them on what they are good at instead of criticising their weaknesses.

Parents of today’s generation were raised to adhere to certain styles of living. Times have changed, technology has advanced, cultures have evolved and even the way children’s minds develop has changed, she says.

 It is, therefore, incongruent to pin children by life’s standards of decades gone by. Instead of losing them to death or to the blank world of nowhere, it’s better to keep them home even if they weren’t making progress of any kind.

*Some names have been changed to protect their identity.