0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Men everywhere are more likely to kill themselves than women are, but the ratios in Guyana are heavily skewed towards males. Many drink weedkiller, a particularly distressing and protracted death. Most live in rural areas and are middle-aged or elderly (despite heavy media coverage of teenage suicides).The Guyana Foundation, a recently created non-governmental organisation, this month released findings from a study based on in-depth interviews by Serena Coultress, a student at the Global Health programme at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She talks of hopelessness and frustration among men who are unable to fulfil their expected role as provider, and who turn to domestic violence, alcohol abuse and, sometimes, suicide. The numbers show that Indo-Guyanese people are more at risk from suicide than Afro-Guyanese but that, she says, may simply be because most of the rural population is of Indian origin.
