These posts raise curiosity as to why people commit suicide. They have inspired me to research on the subject and those interested in this phenomenon may find the reading below fascinating. Please, read and you may help someone with this info.
1. A man in Baringo has committed suicide after getting reports that his wife has been engaging in an extra-marital affair.
The lifeless body of Kokwon Lochale, 43 who was working as a private security guard in a local road construction company was found hanging on a tree near Bartabwa dam on Thursday morning.
2. On the material day, the Nairobian reports, the deceased left his Pangani Palace apartment at around 5.40 am, getting to the office at 6.15 am only to find four other colleagues already hard arrived at work.
The previous night, the trained civil engineer had left his 12th floor office at 1.30 am. He was apparently handling a cement manufacturer who had been ”suspended from the Nairobi Securities Exchange” and placed in his care.
In the morning at around 7.40 am he is said to have asked for a meeting room as his clients were showing up at 9.00 am. His divisions head’s personal assistant assigned him the Kilimanjaro 2 meeting room five floors from his office.
He left behind his jacket and took with him his laptop never to return.
It is not known whether someone joined him in the room before he jumped to his death.
Mumbo had before the fateful day worked for PWC for at least 13 years during which he experienced work related burnouts thrice in a span of two years, the Nairobian indicates.
https://www.kenyatalk.com/index.php?threads/steve-mumbo-rip-last-day.91014/
3. Former Kenyatta University Vice-Chancellor Prof Olive Mugenda was divorced by her husband, the late Prof Abel Mugenda, because “she was moving with small boys and coming home late,” according to court documents
Abel, a professor of statistics and research at USIU, died on January 5 after jumping from the sixth floor of the White Rhino Hotel in Nyeri County. He was 66.
The family had issued a statement, also given to President Uhuru Kenyatta that Abel, a scholar, and quantity surveyor, had succumbed to a “short illness.”
4. In the months leading up to her death, Victoria (or Vic, as she was called by friends) kept a journal in which she meticulously recorded the torsions of her darkening headspace. Wry and brilliant, Vic proved an astute observer of her peers, as in one passage in which she briskly dissects a paragon of “Mean Girls” popularity: “Walking down Claymore Avenue with $200 Nikes and a cloned training buddy, no doubt to the gym. . . . It’s kind of beyond me how anyone can have their life so sorted.” As her depression deepens, her prose grows more self-aware and more gravely disconsolate. “Today was bad,” she writes. “Sat in the shower. Did the whole crying bit. Sat in bed. Did the whole sad songs and crying bit . . . PLEASE MAKE THIS SAD STOP. FUCKING MAKE IT STOP. God, something out there, please make it stop.”
On April 14th, 2014, around four o’clock in the morning, Victoria McLeod, a seventeen-year-old from New Zealand, stood on the roof of a Singapore condominium building, texted a curt farewell to her friends (“Love you all, sorry guys”), and leaped ten floors to her death. Some weeks later, Victoria’s mother spotted a long scuff mark on the building’s façade, which suggested that her daughter had tweaked the trajectory of her fall, ensuring that she landed between parked cars on a narrow parcel of tile. “She was so focussed,” Linda McLeod said, “even when she jumped.”
According to Jesse Bering, a research psychologist at the University of Otago and the author of the new book “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves,” Vic’s journal is an “extraordinary” portrait of cognitive unraveling. While scrutinizing the diary of an adolescent may seem like a dubious scientific enterprise, Bering shows how the evolution of Vic’s dejected bulletins accords with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister’s “Suicide as Escape from Self,” a six-stage theory demonstrating how a person might descend into the pit of self-extinction. What undergirds Bering’s inquiry is the belief that locating the psychological blunders that lead to suicide can help, in time, to curb their prevalence. For Bering, the subject is personal. He writes, “When I get suicidal again—not if, but when—I want to be armed with an up-to-date scientific understanding that allows me to critically analyze my own doomsday thoughts or, at the very least, to be an informed consumer of my own oblivion.”
The timing of Bering’s book is hardly coincidental. Between 2008 and 2016, suicide rates went up in almost every state, and a spate of recent articles have purported to explain why certain demographics—farmers, veterans—have been killing themselves in unprecedented numbers. Bering’s volume thus joins a niche canon of suicide studies—or suicidologies—which, throughout history, has sought to explore the lure of self-destruction. Such volumes include Émile Durkheim’s “Suicide: A Study in Sociology,” Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” and A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study in Suicide.” Each of these books is a fossil record of its specific historical context. Durkheim’s tome, which was published in 1897, is a glittering testament to the Progressive Era, with its dogged faith in social engineering and its suggestion that suicides can be thwarted via institutional reform. “The Savage God,” meanwhile, was published in 1971, and is haunted by the spectre of Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis.
Somewhat predictably, then, Bering’s book reflects our own cultural fixations. An early chapter, for instance, wonders if suicide should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation. He summarizes the neuroscientist Denys deCatanzaro, who pioneered the gene-centric view of suicide in the nineteen-eighties, as having said that suicidal thinking is “most common in people facing poor reproductive prospects” and who consume “resources without contributing to their family.” Picture a thirty-year-old burnout who relies on the munificence of a more successful older brother. By committing suicide, this individual might ensure his own genetic survival; from a biological standpoint, the older brother’s offspring will have a better chance of thriving if the sponger no longer exists. (As Bering has noted, these “adaptive” decisions aren’t conscious but result, instead, from latent, primordial triggers.) A similar logic underwrites the altruistic suicides that the explorer Knud Rasmussen observed among the Netsilik Inuit community in Canada, where elderly clan members truncated their lives to reduce the caretaking burdens on the next generation.
Bering also examines the role of von Economo neurons (VENs), spindle-shaped cells that contribute to empathy, self-awareness, and other advanced social functions. One study by the neuropsychiatrist Martin Brüne found “significantly greater densities of VENs in the brains of the suicide victims compared to those in the control group.” Another section explores cyberbullying as a possible culprit, although Bering displays the telltale ambivalence of someone who fears being pegged as a Luddite. “The internet is a manifestation of human nature,” he writes, “and because of its unique capacity to bridge formidable social divides, it’s important to emphasize that it summons not only the worst in us, as we’ve seen but also an astonishing amount of good.” He goes on to extol the ameliorative efforts of companies like Facebook, which use artificial intelligence to detect posts that mention suicide and other idioms of self-harm. Scanter attention gets paid to the numerous studies that show that young people who use social media experience higher rates of depression.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-two-faces-of-suicide