Killing and Suicide

There is one interesting article in the local newspaper several days ago, related to my article on the tendency of women to kill their children and then commit suicide I posted here. I entitled it “Three Recent Cases in Indonesia”.

There is one interesting phenomenon to ponder: there is a clear difference on the reason why men and women kill some other people before they commit suicide. Apparently men and women choose different victims to kill: men kill people whom they think rob their happiness, pride, and self esteem; while women kill people whom they think will suffer most after they commit suicide.

The “temptation” to commit suicide is of course because victims feel that they no longer can endure their “pain”, their depression due to problems accumulated in their lives. The reasons recognized are different: men’s reason is mostly related to their jobs; while women’s is mostly related to their familial problems.

One case taken as an example is a policeman shot his superior for transferring him to a smaller town. After that, this policeman committed suicide. He might have thought that his pride and self-esteem would decline because he was transferred to a smaller area. It hurt his pride as a man? Why didn’t he just commit suicide without killing anybody? He did not want to see the one who made him lose his dignity as a man alive safe and sound.

For women, the writer of the article took one case of a woman who killed her four little children, and then committed suicide. It was predicted that she had big financial problems while her husband was away and not easily accessible. This particular woman might have thought that nobody would take care of her children after she committed suicide. Therefore, in order not to make her children suffer more, she decided to kill them all. After death, no more misery, no more problems.

Another interesting finding (for me, at least LOL) is that women get depression more often than men. The comparison is about 3:1 (according to the writer of the article, based on patients coming to his clinic). However, women tend to be able to cope up with their depression much better than men do. When coming to suicide as the “solution” to end their misery, the comparison is on the contrary—men commit suicide three times more often than women do.

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