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Why are Iranian Teens Choosing Suicide?

June 12, 2016
Shima Shahrabi
5 min read
Why are Iranian Teens Choosing Suicide?

When a 16-year old student at Farzanegan High School took a photograph with his classmates and his teacher just after a literature exam, nobody expected to find his lifeless body a few minutes later. After taking the photograph, the student asked permission to go to the bathroom. Soon after, he was found hanged. 

Over the past year, increasing numbers of students have chosen to end their lives. The police have reported at least 18 deaths by suicide among children and teenagers. One hanged himself with an electrical cable; another threw herself off a footbridge and landed on a highway, while another used his mother’s shawl to hang himself. 

Full statistics on suicides in Iran are not available, and it is impossible to know how many young Iranians have attempted suicide and survived. But the list of 18 suicides reported by the police and published on the website Khabar Online offers some insight into the scale of the problem. The site provides a range of information on the tragedies, including the date of death, the location where the suicide took place, and names of the deceased where available. In some cases, it even lists a reason why a young person might have committed suicide, based on what was going on in their lives at the time of their death, or on conversations they had with family members or friends.    

I asked psychologist Dr. Reza Yazdani why a child or a teenager in Iran might turn to suicide. Yazdani believes that the increase in suicides among younger people is a symptom of a depressed and unhealthy society. “A society is sick when its children and teenagers end up believing life is futile and choose death,” he says. He points to depression, family quarrels and financial hardship as contributing factors. “Depressed parents can create an environment where their children become depressed,” he says, “and studies show that the rate of depression in Iran is climbing.”

Twelve Percent of Iranians Are Depressed

Speaking at a conference in May, Health Minister Dr. Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi said that 12 percent of Iranians suffer from depression. At the conference, which looked at ways of preventing dangerous social behaviors and focused on suicide specifically, Hashemi  said that he believed depression was a leading factor in suicides. 

According to Hashemi, family quarrels are another contributing factor. “In families where parents constantly quarrel and ignore their children, the feeling of futility descends on children and young adults,”  says Dr. Yazdani. As a result, he said, many young people took the decision to end their lives. He also warned of the negative impact puberty can have on mental health. “During the critical years of puberty, parents must pay more attention to their children. If for some reason a child is in a weak position among his classmates, or if he does not excel in his studies and his parents admonish him, he might lose all self-confidence and ask himself why he should exist at all. This can lead to an irrational decision.”

In the Khabar Online report, out of the 18 cases of suicide listed, three of the victims had been involved in family quarrels prior to their death. The first one listed is a boy of 16, who hanged himself while his family was sleeping after his father had reprimanded him. In another case, a girl in ninth-grade threw herself off the top floor off her family's apartment building after an argument. The article also raises the case of a girl of 13 who threw herself off Tehran’s Velayat footbridge and landed on the highway after a fight with her mother.

According to Dr. Yazdani, class inequality and envy are also contributing factors when it comes to suicides among young people. “When class inequality increases and when children and young adults try to keep up financially with others and are afraid of being ridiculed, they might be pushed into making wrong decisions,” he says.

This brings to mind the case of Shevan, the 11-year-old student in Oshnavieh in West Azarbaijan who hanged himself last winter. According to newspaper Shargh, at his funeral his father said that on the morning of the incident, Shevan had told him that the school had asked students to bring in money to buy some necessary school supplies. The boy told his father that if he couldn't get the money, he would kill himself.

Society has become De-sensitized to Violence 

The sociologist Dr. Zahra Yousefi, however, believes that the fact that violence has become so banal in Iranian society plays more of a role in young suicides than anything else. “What can we expect when we hang people in public and publish pictures and videos of executions for everybody to see?” she asks. “Children are curious and those who have access to the internet and watch these videos are influenced by them.” She points out that most of the students in the Khabar report chose hanging as their preferred method of suicide. “Some of them must have done this out of curiosity,” she says. “We unintentionally promote this punishment through videos, news reports and so on.” Dr Yousefi urges the public to remember the case of a few years ago when an eight-year old boy in Kermanshah died after hanging himself accidentally. The boy and his friends decided to reenact an execution and he ended up dead. Of the 18 students on the list, 12 had committed suicide by hanging themselves, whether by using a shawl, a rope or a cable. 

“The authorities continue public executions to teach people a lesson,” says Dr. Yousefi, “but they are ignorant of the fact that violence begets violence. We have said this over and over for years. It appears we are talking to ourselves because the authorities pay no attention.” And, she says, people continue to watch the horrific spectacle that is the public execution, without understanding its true impact. 

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