The ruling People’s Progressive Party has said that the role it played in poverty reduction has led to 73% of Guyanese proclaiming they were “happy” in a recent Latin American Public Opinion Poll.
The party’s General Secretary Clement Rohee said he failed to see any correlation between the opinion poll findings and the 2014 World Health Organisation report which named Guyana as the country with the highest suicide rate for 2012.
“I don’t see any comparison to the suicide rate,” Rohee said during the party’s weekly press briefing at Freedom House yesterday. Instead of acknowledging a fact that was already addressed by the Health Ministry and published by the WHO, Rohee said that information would needed to be provided to corroborate such a fact.
Rohee said, “The PPP is proud of the role it has played in poverty reduction in Guyana and the strong advocacy it has played in the creation of a better and just society.”
He noted that the “mood of happiness” documented in the poll was a result of hard and “painstaking work” by the PPP/C government.
These statements were aimed at deflecting declarations made by APNU+AFC presidential candidate David Granger during his address at the launch of the coalition on March 4. Granger had stated, “Happy people do not kill themselves; happy people do not kill their wives and one another. Guyana is an unhappy country.”
Rohee said that Granger’s remarks lacked credibility and were a figment of his imagination and were in contrast to the opinion poll. He stated that people are never satisfied with their earnings and that living standards can always be improved, but noted that economic growth provides an improvement in quality of life.
According to the WHO, more than 800,000 people around the world die from suicide every year – around one person every 40 seconds. Some 75% of suicides occur in low and middle-income countries.
In a press release on its first global report on suicide prevention, the WHO said in the Americas, the average estimated suicide rate is 7.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is lower than in other WHO regions and lower than the global average of 11.4 per 100,000.
“However, Guyana has the highest estimated suicide rate for 2012 in the world, and Suriname has the sixth-highest,” the release said, while adding that data from the Americas show that suicide rates first peak among young people, remain at the same level for other age groups, and rise again among older men.
Health Minister Dr Bheri Ramsaran had told Stabroek News after the report was released that his ministry has long since recognised it as a problem and has been working towards addressing it.
According to Ramsaran, it was noted that mental health and rehabilitation service had been pushed to the back burner in the health sector and as a result in the ministry’s recent ten-year health strategy, those two public health issues have been placed on the front burner.
Pressed further on the issue, the minister had said the suicide demographics had changed over the years and that Black Bush Polder is no longer the capital. He said too there has been a shift in the gender and geographic spread.
He said his ministry has created “the tool to address and reduce the suicide rate and that is training, training.”
Critics have said the government has not taken effective measures considering that it has been in office for 22 consecutive years.
Ramsaran’s predecessor Dr Leslie Ramsammy had also identified suicide as a growing problem and one that his ministry would address frontally as the suicide rate climbed year after year. At one time, the minister had said that a multisectoral response was needed to curb suicide and he had launched a follow-back study that was intended to offer researchers a “post-mortem of a person’s life” as the ministry upped efforts to curb the phenomenon. It is not clear what results that study yielded but the then health minister had said that the study would have helped health officers “to understand the footprints – the special characteristics to look for in a person who will attempt or commits suicide successfully.”
