Dan Bauer, Student Suicide, Taiwan

The good Rev. Bauer, who has an opinion column in the pro-KMT China Post, writes on suicide among college students.

Apparently, in a poll of 3,594 university students, 367 claimed to have "attempted suicide" in the past year.

Exclamations that came to my mind in reaction to this news included the following: "Totally unbelievable." "This cannot be true." "There must be a mistake here." "Impossible." "What was that?"

Bauer calculates how many of his students might have attempted suicide, and decides...

I am spending over 40 hours a week in an environment in which I see or have passing relations with 80 people who, in the course of a year, have attempted to kill themselves? I cannot accept those statistics.

....

My theory is that a reporter read the results of the survey in Chinese, but misunderstood how to report those results in English.

Right -- I haven't seen it, so it doesn't exist. Better accept them stats, Rev (Bauer actually wrote to the Taipei Times about this too). Given the high suicide rates here, and the overall social legitimacy of suicide as a response to problems, it isn't surprising that some 10% of students have attempted to end their lives. Indeed, speaking as an advisor to a class of fourth years at my U, that would be what I would have said. Out of my 50 I could easily name 5 who have attempted suicide. In fact, there have been numerous articles on rising suicides among the young over the years, like this one from 2003:

According to the Department of Health's records, in Taiwan, successful suicide attempts committed by people between the ages of 20 and 34 has risen from 22 suicides per hundred thousand in 1994 to 37 last year. (emphasis mine)

My wife and I were just remarking on the recent case of the young woman who, after having a fight with her boyfriend, decided to punish him by killing herself. She went out on the Kaoping Bridge between Fengshan and Pingtung and parked her car in the motorcycle lane there. Being thorough, she then attempted to strangle herself while running the exhaust into the car. Unfortunately a motorcyclist hurrying to work hit her at speed and died. Fate loving irony, naturally our self-centered heroine survived. Asked why she parked in such a dangerous spot, she retorted "Why should I think about such things? I was going to kill myself!"

Such incidents shed light on what the young might be thinking. It is worth recalling that websites on how to commit suicide began proliferating a few years ago, the gov't deemed them dangerous and shut them down.

The Taipei Times summary that attracted Bauer's attention is here. Sinorama has a three-page article on suicide in Taiwan that is well worth reading:

In terms of age brackets, the suicide rate in Taiwan peaks twice: among the old and among teenagers.

Old people commit suicide faced with "the bleak years of decline." It's distressing, but not incomprehensible. When teenagers-who should have their best years ahead of them-kill themselves, however, it is both saddening and inexplicable. It was in July 1994 that Taiwan was stunned when two high-achieving pupils from the elite Taipei First Girls High School killed themselves in a hotel in a suicide pact.

People are horrified at the suicide rates among the young; but according to this article, the suicide rate is even higher among the elderly. The next time you hear a Taiwanese scoff at US nursing homes, just cite these stats at them:

In Taiwan, the rate of suicide among elderly women is 3.2 times higher than the rate for women in general, while the corresponding ratio is 4.2 in Singapore and 2.4 in Japan. In contrast, the ratio is only 1.2 in the US and 1.5 in the UK, Sweden and Australia-countries with a developed system of welfare provision for the elderly.

[Taiwan]