MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Mental wellness must be SA’s New Year resolution

On New Year’s Eve, the Gauteng MEC for health, Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, led a crossover operation in Hillbrow, where makeshift clinics were set up to attend to stabbing and shooting victims.

Throughout the day and night, emergency officials across the province attended to various incidents, many of them violence and drunk driving cases. Unfortunately, these are common during this period of the year and medical facilities see an exponential increase in patients who are victims of violent encounters.

But emergency officials also had to deal with another, less spoken about issue – suicide attempts.

According to the Gauteng Emergency Management Services call centre, by 10pm on New Year’s Eve, it had responded to over 1,500 calls, most of which were suicide attempts. It is gut-wrenching that while billions of people across the world were ushering in the new year with merry celebrations and resolutions, thousands of South Africans were on the verge of ending it all.

But while it may be numbing, it reflects the state of our country. SA has one of the highest suicide rates globally, ranking at number 10. In Africa, we are second only to Eswatini.

The suicide rate of 23.5 per 100,000 people means that every year, at least 14,000 people die by suicide. This is exactly half the number of people who die from tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in SA.

The socioeconomic situation in SA is hurling thousands of people into unimaginable depths of desperation. While suicide rates are declining in most parts of the world, in SA, the opposite is happening.

It is not an accident that the age profile of those who die by suicide is younger in SA than it is in most parts of the world. Young people in SA are particularly affected by the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequalities, and are products of parents who are battling with unresolved generational trauma.

The cost of living crisis is a significant contributor to our suicide crisis. The crisis shouldn’t be viewed only in the recorded numbers of suicides, but also in the attempts. Statistics show that in SA, there is a higher proportion of suicide rates among men.

However,research also shows that women report twice as many suicide attempts as men. There may be a link between this and the growing levels of maternal filicide as well as single parenting by women.

Over the past few years, there have been distressing cases of mothers killing their children on account of the unbearable cost of living and the burden of child care that is placed firmly on the shoulders of women.

This is indicative of the mental health strain that women in particular are taking. But men are not spared either as the burden of unemployment, substance abuse and poverty sits heavily on their shoulders.

All this lays the foundation for the mental health problems that have become a pandemic in our country. SA has a significant burden of mental healthissues, which contributes to the soaring rate of suicide.

And while adequate mentalhealthcare provision couldreduce the high suicide rate,mental healthcare is not simply about medicating people. It has been documented that mental illness may not often be best treated with medication, but interventions outside the biomedical model may be more appropriate and effective.

It is for this reason that the government, communities and other stakeholders must be actively involved in the development of multi-faceted and multidisciplinary interventions to dealing with mental health challenges as one of the ways of addressing the crisis of suicide.

This must include supporting collective initiatives like community gardens which bring people together and provide a sense of belonging. When people feel valued and part of a community, they don’t feel isolated and unworthy. As a country, focusing on mental health as a suicide prevention method must be one of our resolutions for 2024.