Japan struggles with suicides

Japan struggles with suicides
By Chris Hogg, BBC
Japan accepts that it has a problem with suicides but struggles to find a solution to combat it...
Earlier this year the Japanese government released the results of a survey which suggested that one in five men and women in the country had seriously thought of taking their own life. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the industrialised world. On average around ninety people kill themselves in Japan every day. In past years the suicide rate peaked each time the country's economy fell into recession. Now that Japan's government has reported one quarter of negative growth, and signalled it is likely there are more to follow, there are fears of further increases in the number of people taking their own lives. Many of those who choose to kill themselves go to Tojimbo Cliffs whose stone columns rise 25 metres above the Sea of Japan. Each evening, a retired policeman, Yukio Shige, patrols the cliffs looking for those he thinks might be planning to jump. If he suspects someone is contemplating suicide he approaches them and starts a conversation, hoping to change their mind. “For a lot of them it’s a cry for help,” he says. “They are really hoping someone will stop them before they take their own lives.” Sometimes grown men burst into tears in front of him, he says. “I say to them 'You must be in a lot of pain, tell me what happened.” He is a volunteer. His group offers help and support to those he saves from the cliff edge. He has saved around a 150 people who had planned to kill themselves, many more men than women. Often their problems are to do with work. “Takanori,” a young man in his mid-20s who asked not to have his real name used, is one of them. A few months ago he came to the cliffs intending to throw himself into the sea after losing his job. Standing on the cliff edge, he recalls what drove him to such desperation. “I went to the unemployment office, but there was only training and help for older people,” he says. “People of my age were supposed to cope with this difficult situation alone. There was no help for me at all.” It was not always like this. Going to work for a Japanese company used to be like joining a family. You worked there your whole life. But in today’s harsher economic climate, that is no longer the case. “This means there's a lot more working poor, a lot more who are worried about losing their job, a lot more people stressed out that they might lose their job,” says Professor Jeff Kingston from Temple University in Tokyo. He points out that the lack of adequate mental health services and a growing number of elderly people here, an age group more prone to take their own lives than others, are to blame too. But if, as most economists believe, Japan is in recession already, then any spike in suicides this time could be worse than before. The internet makes it easier to find new ways to kill yourself. For instance, it is not hard to find instructions for how to make lethal poison gas from household cleaning products. Hundreds of people have used this method to kill themselves in Japan this year. Japan accepts that it has a problem with suicides but struggles to find a solution to combat it.