Suicide is arguably more prevalent in Egypt than it has been in a long time: Sahar El-Bahr reports It is late. The father, 60, wakes up to his daughters, 25 and 36, screaming. Between them they have swallowed approximately 300 tabs of heart medicine and are in the throes of death. The father, too shocked to save their lives, swallows all that remains: 25 tabs, which prove sufficient. There is no one else in the house. All three die in the same room, on the spot. It is the father's second wife -- the girl's mother died 20 years ago -- who discovers them. The Heliopolis apartment has neither furniture nor food; only two mattresses and a bottle of water. It turns out this is actually a well-off family, and their tragedy started a long time before when the father's 35 feddans of land in Beheira, 165km north of Cairo, were seized by those who rented them out and the courts failed to issue a verdict in his favour. To cover lawyers' expenses, the family was forced to sell everything in their possession, including another five feddans of land and the furniture in the house. They had been reduced to depending on the charity of their neighbours. Graduates of law and art, respectively, the daughters had failed to find decent employment; and to top it all off, the sole prospective breadwinner, a 32-year-old brother, had died in a car accident a year before the incident. By the time they reached the Toxins Centre -- Cairo's oldest, and only dedicated establishment for dealing with drug overdoses -- all three victims were already dead. According to the centre's deputy manager Mahmoud Lutfi, this widely publicised case is one of many: some 12,000 cases in Cairo in 2006, 9,000 in the 15-25 age bracket, among whom 7,000 were female. Since the 1980s, the percentage of suicides among those received at the centre rose from 19 to 50 per cent. (The centre's figures are the closest estimate since in Egypt registers of suicide cases are not kept.) Seconding Lutfi's report that the majority of cases are from the middle class, National Council of Social and Criminal Research sociologist Fouad El-Said said suicide rates are on the rise due to poverty -- even, and notably among the middle to upper class, which is expected to spread further as privatisation gains momentum. Unemployment, inflation and the deterioration of living standards as well as financially rooted family, notably marital problems, are simply too much to cope with. El-Said called on the government to provide support programmes for future casualties of privatisation. But there is another, not altogether unrelated reason behind suicide among students: fear of exams and exam scores, which seem to determine people's financial future. Psychological pressure and unemployment among graduates of the so- called top faculties notwithstanding -- indeed, according to many sources, national universities are so overcrowded and their staff so corrupt that higher education amounts to little more than a means to acquiring a degree certificate -- parents remain absurdly over-enthusiastic about marks. The Heliopolis incident, El-Said added, shows that suicide also results from frustration with the ability of the legal system to grant legitimate rights -- a consequence not only of bureaucracy but of corruption. Lutfi says even the centre's rate is high by international standards, though the true figures are probably higher still. Egyptian tradition views suicide with shame, so families will often hide a suicide to avoid a scandal and police involvement: "if I had a suicide in my family, I wouldn't want to tell the police." Drugs notwithstanding, ingestion of insecticides remains the most common mode of self-harm. The rates rise in the summer and during Ramadan, especially when the latter coincides with the start of the school year. Both the amount of toxin ingested and the speed at which the victim is conveyed to the centre determine the possibility of saving that victim's life. Often victims leave letters behind: "sometimes they'll take a small dose of a given drug because what they really want is attention. But even those who were dead serious, once their lives are saved, feel extremely grateful and regret the decision. We refer our cases to a psychiatrist for the appropriate treatment and, yes, whether we want to or not, we inform the police." Cairo University psychologist Safaa Abdel-Qader describes suicide as "inner violence" directed inward -- in criminal cases the same violence is directed outward -- to get even with a society that has failed the victim. The technical reason for the rise in suicide rates is an increase in the number of depressives -- some 11-18 per cent of the total population, according to official statistics, though the International Association of Psychology (IAP) estimates that some 20 million Egyptians suffer from at least one symptom of depression, with the age at which it sets in dropping from 34 to 24 years old in the last few years. Depression is in turn caused by economic and social frustrations, Abdel-Qader says: suicide is but a reaction to cumulative frustrations, making the 15-25 age bracket likely candidates, since the young are ambitious and susceptible to a sense of futility induced by bleak economic prospects and social injustice. Parents should keep an eye on their children for symptoms of depression, she said, which could very conceivably lead to suicide.
