1) Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for more deaths than malaria, HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and war. Over 1% of all deaths in 2019 were the result of suicide. 2) Most suicides occur in low-and-middle income countries, where 77% of global suicides take place. Over half of all suicides are by individuals under 50 years old. 3) Suicide is influenced by a variety of factors including epidemiological, psychiatric, psychological, sociological, neurological, economic, and existential factors. Underlying these various perspectives may be issues of freedom and unfreedom in human existence.

1. Suicide as unfreedom & vice
versa
Dr Madhu Prabakaran

2. Global Suicide Statistics
Suicide is the leading causes of death worldwide,
with more deaths due to suicide than to malaria,
HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, or war and homicide.
More than one in every 100 deaths (1.3%) in 2019
were the result of suicide
Source: Suicides Worldwide report by WHO 2020 (based on 2019 data)

7. Globally, the majority of deaths by suicide occurred in
low-and-middle-income countries (77%), where most
of the world’s population live (Figure 5). More than half
of global suicides (58%) occurred before the age of 50
years. Most adolescents who died by suicide (88%)
were from low- and middle-income countries where
nearly 90% of the world’s adolescents live.

13. Suicide Deaths are preventable!

14. Causes of Suicide?
• Epidemiological: Contagious psychiatric disorder
• Psychiatric: adverse childhood conditions, mood disorders & other clinical
psychiatric causes- biased towards developing diagnostic systems.
• Psychological: focus on the personal dimensions of anomy, guilt, despair or
exclusion or developmental, familial, stress related issues, or conditions of
hopelessness, interpersonal, and rational dimensions of suicide. They study
it by variables such as depression, self-esteem, the locus of control,
emotional disturbance and recent stressors
• Sociological: concentrate on the collective aspects of suicide such as its
statistical pattern of recurrence, social fact, shame, excessive individualism,
& social exclusion

15. New Sociologists: iintegrate the agency centered psychological and
micro sociological aspects with its structural counterpart and probed
the ‘structurational’ aspects of suicide such as social constructions/
expectations of masculinity, prestige, media contagion,
Neurologists: brain processes such as serotonin dysfunction, which may
result into impulsive suicide, also they explore from genetical basis
(bio-chemical causes)
Economists: See it from utility & rational choice

16. Is there an underlying factor that unites all
these?

17. Underlying factor could be existential!
• Suicide has its morphology, syntax, and structural aspects of grammar
at its broadest level
• At its lived contingency it has it has its contextual meanings, praxis,
generative grammar and micro aspects of semantics.
• Langue & parole of suicide!

18. There are
• Clustered & contagious suicides – specific to age, gender, class &
status – affecting the outliers within the “history-power-state regime”
• It happens by “intense suffering” mostly caused by the
“unsympathetic alterity”
• Triggered by adventitious storms of figurations that disposition
suicide victims into unknown destinies – the ‘progress’ or
‘development’ that sets their lives on unknown, uncertain paths
• suicides are both statements of protest and despair in reaction to
lives which have been turned into “unfree bare life”

19. Freedom & Unfreedom
• Freedom is the essential condition of human life- fundamental
property and active aspect of the human species and its praxis.
• Deprivation of freedom damages the very being of human, and
hence, that lead them to death, especially when it is felt acute.
• “Freedom has its foundation in human care-structure and its
engagement” – Heidegger
• Freedom is the ultimate property of being human. Human existence is
a discovery of freedom.
• When freedom is at stake, death becomes the chosen option- that is
suicide

20. Unfreedom is
• Ecology of unfreedom
• Restrain on projective openness
• Restrain care of self
• Deprives authentic existence as human

21. Unfreedom is freedom corrupted by
• State of exception
• Narcissist alterity and
• Constraints imposed on aspects of freedom

24. Freedom is life, and unfreedom is suicidal
• Unfreedom is suicidal & freedom of being human is life nurturing.
• Suicides indicate human life is existentially constrained, and that
human condition is resisted through statements of suicides.
• That indicates, what we collectively done to the very aspect of being
human.