EDITORIAL - Chilling fad

Much has been said about that man who jumped from a coconut tree (other reports said he actually fell) and survived, not to tell the tale but to bear the scars of his folly, as well as become the butt of jokes arising from his misadventure.

What most people do not see about the incident is that it was one more in a lengthening string of suicides, mostly involving young people. These suicides started to catch attention late in 2011 when they really started coming one after the other.

Virtually all accounts of these suicides centered on the acts themselves, more like simply making a tally to keep score. Nobody seemed compelled to look deeper into the suicides themselves to see what was causing the trend.

Clearly there is a sociological facet to the rash of suicides other than the manifest psychological explanations people tend to expect. It is this sociological facet that the authorities should be concerned about.

People tend to wave off psychological explanations mainly because they seem matters beyond the help of ordinary mortals. But sociological concerns are something that even ordinary folk can understand and get a firm grip on.

Do the suicides have something to do with family relations, home life, community environment, school pressure, etc.? There is really a need to get to the bottom of these unwanted incidents because they are no longer just isolated.

The authorities need to take more than just a passing interest in this phenomenon and treat it as something that really happened. Our fear is that, with the passing year and a new year ahead, we may tend to look at it as part of the past.

To be sure, we hope and pray that, indeed, they are a thing of the past, that there will be no more, or at least fewer such chilling incidents this year and in the years to come. But that does not mean we should lose interest in getting to the bottom of what really happened.