SUICIDE: A THOUGHT BY THE RIVER SIDE

SUICIDE: A THOUGHT BY THE RIVER SIDE

I pondered while I sat by the banks of River Niger during one of my visit to my root as my father had once said.

The waves of suicide and what this meant stuck to me like a flea. 

It wouldn't leave met to my own whims, I capitulated and then began to ponder. 

Suicide is more often than not an end product of depression, it's manifestation comes in different shades.

In other words suicide isn't the only outcome of depression, it maybe considered the most extreme. 

In reality many of us are vulnerable if placed under conditions beyond our emotional threshold. 

Conditions that could trigger that part of us we do not know. 

When this happens we may not take our life because we are normal.

Not many among us are.

And they may not know it. 

It is when the pressures of life comes heavy that one begins to fall apart.

And weakness sets in.

And then manifestation becomes astute. 

It is not often the making of these victims, after all contemplating suicide, let alone taking ones life isn't a joke. 

It is one of the bravest wrong doing. 

Even Saddam Hussein and Maummar Gaddafi couldn't do it in the most trying times.

They ran for the life they consider precious. 

We all do not have the same degree of holding on, and that of an afterthought, reason why Adolf Hitler took his life, and the two mentioned above did not. 

That man or woman that gets visibly angry over everything, depression maybe a consequence. 

That man or woman who perpetually beats his wife or her husband over nothing of substance, depression maybe a consequence.

That man or woman who is emotionally laden, and who snaps at every news or sight of gory, and may begin to beat self up for what has befallen another is depression prone.

That guy, a handsome quiet dude who often seats at a corner lonely and solemn, not talking to anyone but self, depression maybe a consequence. 

The complexity of depression and the fact that it is a mental disorder sums up the height of its outcome,  that is suicide should be seen in light of a failure to save a mentally challenged individual. 

That one committed suicide does not mean you to can't because in some instance we do not know the state of our mental balance until we are put to test. 

In addition, some of these victims too thought they would never indulge, when the thought, and then the act snapped them up, they did not know.

Ask friends and they would tell you that some of these victims were normal people, socially active and loving, while some are queer personified like Akachi Okechukwu who wooed death like a beautiful bride. 

His case remains an outside for me because he was brazen and audacious about taking his own life. 

He was simply put an abnormal human, if not for anything by a mere look at his facebook profile picture and his timeline. 

His lines of poetry does not depict his age, his wavy brain was like that of Shakespeare, and his repugnance of God at such age remains amazing.

Depression and suicide are all complex; do not judge beyond what you know. 

If it isn't you,  you wouldn't know, all you can do is relate. 

Agboeze Chidi