By Savitri Persaud and D. Alissa Trotz
Savitri Persaud is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada, whose research looks at disablement, mental health, and violence in Guyana and the Caribbean. D. Alissa Trotz is editor of the In the Diaspora Column.
On June 3rd, the British based Guardian newspaper carried an article that addressed the issue of Guyana having the highest suicide rate in the world (according to the article, it currently stands at 44.2 suicides per 100,000 people, some 2 ¾ times the international average which is 16 per 100,000). The insightful contribution was written by Farahnaz Mohammed, a young journalist who took the time to contact local voices, (including Anthony Autar from the Guyana Foundation, a young blogger from Jamaica courageously breaking the silence to share his own journey of mental illness, and one of the authors of this week’s column whose doctoral research addresses these issues), giving this carefully researched and beautifully written article a situated urgency that is so necessary at this time.
The importance of a committed and holistic approach was driven home in the opening sections where Mohammed recounted the then Guyana government’s response to the ingestion of pesticides as a method of taking one’s life; in a May 30, 2014 article, Kaieteur News reported that through a lottery (of all things!), ten farmers had been provided with storage cabinets with locks to prevent what was described as the “irresponsible” and “unsafe” use of pesticides by ‘many.’ This is a truly remarkable and sanitized description of suicide if ever there was one, nor was this inadequate preventative measure systematically linked to an integrated response that meaningfully involved communities and other institutional mechanisms or spaces. In her moving short story, ‘Barred: Trinidad 1987,’ Trinidadian-Canadian author Ramabai Espinet gives Gramoxone, a well-known pesticide, its other name, suicide tonic – so called because of the popularity of this other deadly usage. As Espinet notes, the nickname also becomes a shorthand stereotype for suicides in rural, Indo-Trinidadian communities that can dismiss this as a problem of ‘culture’ without engaging the complex factors that produce such relationships to death across different communities in the Caribbean.
Although it requires another column, we might well wonder what it means that the application of toxic chemicals seen as necessary to the flourishing of crops (forms of plant life that provide nourishment or a way of living for households and communities) becomes the means to snuff a life out? In fact, what does it mean that toxic chemicals are required at all and in such quantities – are there other ways of producing and providing for our communities that are less injurious to body, mind, soul and spirit? What does a truly holistic, integrated approach to nourishing all aspects of our lives look like?
Given the care that was taken with this piece, we immediately contacted Farahnaz Mohammed, asking her whether she might be interested in sharing the article in a Guyanese newspaper. We felt that it was important that the issue had received international attention and we wanted to provide a space for Guyanese readers to take it up in our own ways, in this place where the issue named is an ongoing one. Ms. Mohammed responded immediately and graciously, delighted that her concern could reach a regional audience. However, she had neither editorial control over the final version of the article nor copyright. For that we would have to contact the Guardian newspaper itself. A prompt, polite exchange with a sympathetic representative from the Sales Department at Guardian News and Media Ltd. quite quickly established that while we could provide a hyperlink, free of charge, to the Guardian story, we would have to pay for a licence to reprint the article in any Guyanese newspaper. One wishes we lived in a different world where corporate bottom lines do not trump the imperatives of social justice. In the week the Guardian article ran, according to Annan Boodram of The Suicide Epidemic, the media reported three suicides in Guyana and one attempt in which a woman set herself ablaze (newspapers yesterday report her as being on life support with doctors saying they can do nothing more for her). As we responded to the Guardian, it is beyond frustrating when, as in this case, an article is run on a critical social issue on a country (so the hope is that the more attention one brings to this, by any means, the better), and then one has to have resources to reprint that article in said country where readers would be very interested in picking up a newspaper to engage with what has been written.
The dollars and cents response also reminds us of what drives corporate media, and the part to be played by attention grabbing statistics. Someone wrote once about being struck by the fact that Haiti is one of the only countries in the world that has a last name – as in, Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – and it is that kind of response one has here, where Guyana makes news because we have the highest suicide rate in the world. Ms. Mohammed wrote an excellent article, but the sad truth of the matter is that the Guardian would likely not have picked it up had it not been for the fact that our numbers were so abysmally high relative to the rest of the world. Try telling that to the family of even one suicide victim in the country with the lowest rates in the world.
Editorial control in corporate media also dictates the final copy. The Guardian chose to title its essay, “Guyana: mental illness, witchcraft, and the highest suicide rate in the world,” despite the fact that the word witchcraft was not used by the author in any of her discussions and she was very careful to write the article in a way that emphasised local definitions and concerns. But the final editorial decision tells us something else, for the use of the word “witchcraft”, offers up Third World pain for spectacular and sensationalized Western consumption. One might say that the article was trying to draw on a term that might be more understandable to an audience not familiar with Caribbean rituals, but why even include it in the first place since the article written by Farahnaz did not engage the question of spirituality in depth? The term “witchcraft” is not one that is readily or widely employed by Guyanese, particularly with reference to Obeah. In Guyana, Obeah is Obeah. According to Taylor and Case in their 2012 publication, The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions, while the use of the word Obeah oftentimes points to practices that are considered malicious and evil, the practice of Obeah is also inclusive of benevolent works intended to bless, heal, and ease distress. The conflation of the term Obeah with “witchcraft” in this headline maligns the dynamic and complex ways in which Obeah is practiced with conceptions of what The Guardian pejoratively brands “witchcraft”. The use of the word “witchcraft” here seems to be used as click-bait by The Guardian and as a proxy for practices that might be wholly read as barbaric and “backward” to a Western audience.
To be sure, it is commonly understood that one might first seek the help of the local Obeah man or Obeah woman living in their village or town when one experiences mental distress. Guyana, however, is home to a multiplicity of religions and even more denominations and sects within each faith. Consequently, not only are the Obeah practitioners sought out, but Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Spiritualist leaders are also asked to provide counsel or perform works to help remedy mental distress. At times, it is not uncommon that several religious leaders of varying faiths and denominations might be asked to provide counsel for the same case if the recipient of those services is dissatisfied with the works of the previous faith practitioner.
And while it is also not uncommon for Guyanese to link behavioural expressions that they consider “mad” to ideas of spirit/demonic possession or notions of “jumbie gat dem” [demons have possessed them] and then seek out religious leaders to perform works that will exorcise said spirit/demon, the West also employs similar practices. In Toronto, the Archdiocese has two on-call exorcists. Similarly, every Church of England Parish in the UK has an appointed exorcist. The West tends to center its use of medicine, while remaining silent about the ways that religion, spirituality, and psychiatry intersect in the global North.
Importantly, we are not romanticising the role of religion and spirituality in multi-faceted approaches to mental health. There have been several incidents in Guyana where women rendered as “mad” or possessed have been beaten, brutalized, and killed by community and church members as a way of expunging disability, “madness”, and difference.
The deaths of Radika Singh, Sangeeta Persaud, and most recently Todah Richards in November 2014, are a stark reminder of how the “mad” body is constructed as violable because the long-standing belief of “beating out spirits and jumbies” is prevalent in Guyanese society. We believe that it is important to engage with religious and spiritual leaders of all faiths in ways that do not result in these violent responses.
We reassert Savitri’s sentiments in The Guardian article, “The problem is cross-cultural. We can’t call certain countries advanced just because they use the medical model.” How we tend to the multiple ways of apprehending psycho-spiritual conceptions of the self begins by mapping out and interrogating how different bodily expressions are read and diagnosed on their own terms and in those specific contexts, Guyana especially. As Farahnaz Mohammed – and all those interviewed – concluded, “Effective suicide prevention comes from a holistic approach – taking more than the individual or the attempt into account, but also the communities in which they live, the cultural attitudes towards mental illness, and the awareness of the issue of suicide. Globally, there needs to be more open discourse about suicide.” The Guardian may not have allowed us to provide her essay in print to Guyanese readers, but we firmly believe that for those with access to the internet, the more people who read her thoughtful contribution, the better. Not because of a corporate bottom line. But because we cannot afford to lose a single person more.
See: Guyana mental illness, witchcraft, and the higest suicide rate in the world
(c) Guardian News & Media Ltd
