Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - June 12, 2005
Brett Horner and Ilse Fredericks

A CHANGING South Africa has exacted a heavy toll on black South Africans. The past decade has seen a 48% increase in suicides among black people as more South Africans than ever before take their own lives to escape their problems.

Nowhere is this more harshly evident than in Umtata, in the Eastern Cape, where an academic has calculated the suicide rate to be in the region of 30 per 100000 people, almost twice the World Health Organisation's estimated global average of 16 per 100000.

"More and more people are committing suicide," said Professor Banwari Meel, who has published five papers on suicide in the Umtata region.

"Female suicide in particular is increasing. In the last five years it has increased at least threefold."

Nationally, too, the numbers are growing and previously uncommon categories of suicide, such as family suicides, are becoming prevalent.

Research released last week by Professor Lourens Schlebusch of the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine at KwaZulu-Natal University shows that suicide now accounts for 10% of all non-natural deaths in South Africa, up from 8% in 1999.

"The figures are inordinately high," said Schlebusch, who sits on a special suicide panel of the World Health Organisation.

Of South Africa's suicide victims, about:

*43% are black;

*38% are white;

*16% are coloured; and

*2% are Indian.

White people are more likely to die as a result of suicide than of homicide in South Africa.

Gaylynn de Villiers, who heads up the Durban support group Survivors of a Loved Ones Suicide, said while the reasons for contemplating taking their life differed from person to person, helplessness and despair were always present.

De Villiers' husband, Craig, killed himself in 2001 following what she believes were years of mental anguish over his time in the army.

For the family they leave, like her, the torment never ends.

"People tell me it has been three and a half years, and I should pull myself together. I say it has only been three and a half years."

The Lubbe family from Mitchells Plain on the Cape Flats are also still coming to terms with the death of 17-year-old Marco, who hanged himself in March following a futile battle with a drug habit.

"The conclusion that we came to was that he couldn't handle the failure because he disappointed us," said his mother, Maureen Lubbe.

But Schlebusch, who runs the Parasuicide Group at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's medical school, said the most telling increase in suicide was among black South Africans.

"The ills of Western civilisation are hitting them," he said.

Although the reasons for the increase in suicides were numerous, Schlebusch said the main factor was stress.

Defining it as the inability to cope with change, Schlebusch said the rapid sociopolitical shifts in South Africa had happened too fast and had left many black people unprepared.

Schlebusch dispelled the misconception that Indians were most prone to suicide, saying it was a distorted perception arising from Indians' concentration in KwaZulu-Natal. When viewed on a national scale, the reality was quite different.

Meanwhile, his figures show suicide among whites has remained reasonably constant, although they too are living in a competitive and stressful environment.

As for the growing number of family suicides, estimated by Schlebusch at about two a month, he said the increasing dysfunction in relationships was caused by similar stress factors.

His colleague Professor Dan Mkize, who is to present a talk at the upcoming international suicide symposium in Durban, agreed with Schlebusch.

He said some of the reasons for the rise in suicides among black people were urbanisation and the disintegration of the family.

Like Meel from Umtata, Mkize blamed disillusionment among those who had had "expectations that democracy was going to come with work, housing, education and so forth".

HIV/Aids has placed another enormous burden on the population, and in South Africa those who have contracted the virus are 36 times more likely to commit suicide, according to Schlebusch's figures.

In one case this week, a woman stabbed herself to death with a broken bottle at Themba Hospital near White River, Mpumalanga, because she believed she was HIV-positive. She had earlier asked nurses to inject her with something to kill her.

The KwaZulu-Natal director of LifeLine, Susan Preller, said the youth were particularly vulnerable to suicide when HIV was a factor.

Preller said that counsellors were increasingly coming into contact with Aids orphans who were struggling to cope with the burden of heading a household.

She said the National Aids hotline, administered by LifeLine, was receiving an average of 20 calls a day from HIV-positive individuals expressing a desire to take their own lives.

"We often see that when people get to know their HIV-positive status that the feelings of despair, hopelessness and fear of disclosing come forward," Preller said.

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