The trauma of suicide and need for raising awareness in our Iranian Community is higher than ever before. Every now and then another tragedy of suicide hits our communities. Suicide is occurring in every community,however in our Iranian one, we lack debate about this issue and we lack to gather preventive measures.
The trauma of losing a soul into the world of helplessness and hopelessness is beyond our cultural understanding. In most suicide cases of suicide among young people you can find a relationship between parental high expectations and these young souls lack of resources.
In many cases of suicide in our communities, we can find patterns of meaninglessness and loss of apatite for life due to unsuccessful events in person’s life. What is our community response to suicide? Silence, shame, guilt, distraction, distorted beliefs, fear, and more silence
In cases of young people committing suicide, we can find manifestations of how some individuals can not stand up to their anxious parents who conditioned love. Suicide becomes a painful act of desperation for people who lack resources in dealing with life tasks or in meeting life, however the context in which these individuals live is significant to understand why suicide happens.
How come we keep silence about suicide? We could save lives if we came out and share our experiences of the loved ones who lost their bodies and minds into the world of darkness. If we let go of the blame mentality, we can see that in general we Iranians are not keen on discussing the sings and symptoms of mental health issues.
What we in the filed of mental health are observing is that, we Iranian parents tend to impose our own beliefs about higher education, position, status, and perfectionism to our younger generation.
It is unfortunate to say that in our Iranian culture, some parents drive their young children to the world of darkness. Why? Haven,t you seen those Parents who are attention seekers, parents who brought up children to this world to have assistance in their senior time, parents who need to control the world, parents who think they are too important why their adult children should be less than perfect? They are all around us, therefore suicide and parenting styles are truly interrelated in our communities.
Some families raise their high standards and their high expectations on their children to a level that children find that unachievable. Our life-style has become most hazardous when it comes to not accepting our inferiority’s and weaknesses. Instead of a humble acceptance of how we could use our strength to a better life, we try to overcompensate all the time by striving for more.
Suicide is the last resource for a person who has lost his/ her faith and the last desperate action to end the pain. This individual lose his or her faith and disappear in most painful ways; Suicide. Parents and families have a responsibility to brake the negative cycle that we live in, the cycle of being forced to a life style we are not a fan of, while we do the same thing to our children.
Suicide in our communities is mostly due to the cultural forces on individuals who do not find the freedom to be who they are because families keep pushing their own agenda on each other. Why I am this discouraging? Because, every suicide is too much of a trauma.
In every community we hear those stories, some are close to our hearts while others make us nervous and anxious. We Iranian can not afford both losing our best young people in Iran’s prisons due to the rapid executions or all other tragedies back home and due to suicide. It seems that we Iranians are living with multiple aspects of death everyday. Suicide is the most horrible one that could be prevented if nothing else is preventable. Hope this article encourages some one to save life by raising awareness about how disco urged people feel when they lose hope.
This article was published originally in EzineArtciles June 11th, 2010. Now it is being republished in the author’s own website.