Suicide is a disease, not a crime - Dr. Akwasi Osei

A psychiatrist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Akwasi Osei claims, “suicide is a disease and anybody who attempts that is crying for help”.

His remarks come in the wake of the incessant suicide attempts and suicide commissions, recently notable is the Catholic priest and tutor at the Saint Victor Major Seminary at Malshegu in the Tamale Metropolis, Reverend Father Kelvin Abakisi who was reported to have committed suicide by hanging on August, 23.

Dr. Akwasi Osei was speaking to Moro Awudu and Fred Chidi on The XYZ Breakfast show about why spiritual leaders are not above tendencies to commit suicide.

Dr. Osei said depression is the commonest cause of suicide,“Scientific evidence shows that for every ten (10) people who attempt suicide or commit suicide, nine of them have mental health problem or ten (10) had depression. In other words, depression therefore is the commonest cause of suicide. Depression is a condition that can affect anybody and when you get depression, you begin to see yourself as useless as not achieved anything. You begin to feel guilty of either a small crime or imaginary crime that you may have not committed at all.”

“You may even go further into hearing voices instructing you to commit suicide and you may do it. Suicide, I want to emphasize, is a symptom or an outcome of mental illness for most cases. Suicide is not a crime, is not a moral issue. It’s a disease and anybody who attempts that is actually crying for help that the society should come to his aid and that the society has failed him. If he commits suicide, what it means is that the society did not recognize that he had a problem so that they could help him and you have allowed him to exit through suicide,” he noted.

Dr. Akwasi Osei moreover enlightened that, "Success or happiness is not just a function of what you have and where you are. It’s a condition of your mind in which you would see that you have achieved what you had set out to achieve. That sense of achievement is what gives the fulfillment and satisfaction. If anything goes on that gives you the impression that you’ve not achieved what you set out to achieve, probably the assignment given to you by God, you’ll begin to think that you’re a failure even when everybody else sees you as successful."

Dr. Akwasi Osei cautioned the general public not to resort to stigmatizing people who attempt suicide by calling them names like referring to them as lunatics.

“It’s important for us to even use words that will not be stigmatizing themselves. Lunacy is not exactly the right word [description]. It’s a mental illness, but it’s not lunacy as such. If somebody is depressed, he’s not mad; it’s a mental health problem and that’s important to understand, but the bottom line is, if somebody has mental illness or depression that will get him to commit suicide, if he had recognized it earlier, he could have been treated.

“Depression is very treatable. One, we need to recognize what is its precipitation and then we handle that. The acute phase of depression itself can cause death, but through medication, through various counselling, it can be treated. We need to appreciate it very early and tackle it,” he stressed.