Modes of suicide in the East and West

My students were miserable and complained about having no ideas to write about for their reflective journals. To help them reflect on elderly care issues, I taught them to use newspapers to identify possible topics.

I started searching for news clips in the papers. Within a day, there were six different news items about older people. One was about a couple leaving a baby in a pram in a mall. After failing to locate the parents for more than an hour, the security staff reported the incident to the police. Eventually, the couple—husband, age 67, and wife, 28—got their baby back from the police station. Next, a senior was knocked unconscious by a vehicle. Third, a fire in a nursing home warranted emergency evacuation of its residents. Then, there was a senior who got drunk and injured himself. Last, two elderly people with chronic illness—a man and a woman—jumped to their deaths.

Common means that elderly people resort to when ending their lives in Hong Kong include jumping from a height, hanging and burning charcoal in a closed room, resulting in death from carbon monoxide poisoning. These methods of suicide are somewhat culture-specific. With space at a premium and the majority of our population living in high-rise apartments—and I mean more than 20 floors and sometimes as many as 60 or 70—choosing to jump as a suicide method is probably out of convenience and ease of availability. Of course, in the West, hanging is also a way to commit suicide, but it is more common among the Chinese. Burning charcoal is becoming more common but, in the past, hanging has been a popular choice.

I wasn’t aware of the cultural difference until I was studying at the University of Toronto and a classmate asked me about it. She was curious and concerned as to why older Chinese people she had come across at work had resorted to ending their lives by such a drastic act as hanging. She was a social worker, you see. At that moment, I became aware that something I had thought was ordinary was, in fact, not so in another culture.

To us Chinese, or at least Hong Kong Chinese, there is nothing drastic about death by hanging. We have learnt about this method of committing suicide since we were small. We watched it in movies and traditional Chinese operas. Whenever a hero or heroine (usually a heroine) in a tragedy wanted to commit suicide, he or she would throw a string or a piece of long cloth through the main wooden frame that held the house together, tie a knot, climb onto a chair and finish the business.

Mostly, these were scenes created for the drama. Sometimes, they were about a heroine fighting against a family that forced her to marry into riches and fame and forget about the guy she loved. Also in these films, if the emperor wanted one of his concubines to die, he would order his officers to throw a long piece of silk cloth at her. Traditional Chinese movies are not graphic at all. So now you can see why killing oneself by hanging is not seen as something drastic in the Chinese population.

I found this revelation quite interesting (not that suicide attempts are interesting, but that observing the differences is). People in different cultures differ not only in how they live their lives, but also in the ways they choose to die.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.