Healthcare professionals are emphasising a concerning trend related to depression.
According to a community psychiatry nurse at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, men account for about 70% of suicides in Ghana.
Francis Yeboah estimates that 1,500 persons take their own lives in the nation as a whole each year.
“I think men are twice the number of females that commit suicide every year,” he said.
He attributed this development to the expectations placed on men in Ghanaian society and a lack of emotional support.
Many societies “assume men are supposed to behave in our lives in a certain way,” Mr. Yeboah said, “you know in the journey of life a lot of things come together and emotion is no respecter of gender.”
“So when a man is facing a crisis, it’s assumed by the community that you don’t need to cry, you need to be hard on yourself, so when he’s trying to exhibit his emotions, you hear other men questioning his manhood”.
“Some of these things make men suppress their emotions and we don’t create an outlet for these emotions to exit which creates a built-up tension in the man leading to suicidal thoughts,” he disclosed.
Speaking on the same program, Dr. Abigail Harding, a psychiatrist at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, claims that divorce and marital problems are the main causes of suicide, among other factors.
“Divorce and break up are some of the top reasons why we get a lot of people thinking of carrying out suicide”.
“There is a lot of emotional investment that goes into relationships and some would even say financial investment that goes into it, when you look at the different factors, someone attached so closely to someone possibly for many years, they’ve invested so much of their lives into them”.
“It can a toll on their mental well-being and that makes them more likely to have these thoughts and when you combine it with the mental vulnerability they may have, because about 95 percent of people who commit suicide have a mental health condition so when you compound it, it makes it more likely that they will carry out suicide,” she explained.
The Criminal Offenses Act of 1960 has been revised by Parliament, making it a criminal to attempt suicide.
People who attempt suicide will be seen as having mental health concerns requiring legal assistance rather than incarceration following the amendment passed by Parliament on March 28.
