Paper short abstract:

Suicide in Guyana cannot be approached as merely a product of mental illness; to create functional suicide prevention strategies, suicide must be understood as a product of cultural and political discourses. In addressing suicide, the differing modes of ethical thinking must be acknowledged.

Paper long abstract:

According the WHO's most annual report, Guyana, a small country in South America, has the highest suicide rate in the world. What is more, talk of people committing suicide is both ubiquitous and exceedingly casual. Although there are a variety of mental health awareness programs and campaigns in Guyana, they do not seem to be affecting the country's rampant suicide rate. My research on Guyana seeks to approach this issue from a non-western viewpoint in which suicide is not necessarily a product of long-term mental illness or depression—there is, in fact, a very low percentage of identification with, or correlation to, mental illness. Suicide is represented as an impulsive action that is most commonly caused by love loss, and which seeks to articulate a protest against that loss. As well, due to Guyana's corrupt and complex political history, in which majority of citizens are unable attain any common capabilities, suicide can be viewed as a way for one to assert the agency they lack within their political system and communities. When we cease to view suicide as a universal label, we can see that it emerges as a locally attached complex, deeply rooted in cultural discourse. I investigate Guyana's societal norms, cultural divides and political infrastructures in order to better understand why the rate of suicide is so high is a country where mental illness diagnosis is so low, thus contributing to recent academic conceptualizations of suicide's differing relationships to personal hardship, despair, and public protest.