Susceptible souls.

Byline: Zara Maqbool

On June 14, a promising handsome Indian actor, Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide by hanging himself in his bedroom. It was stated that the actor suffered from depression for the last six months.

His suicide shook people across the subcontinent, and I saw many people shocked and sad at the choice this 34-year-old actor with a boyish charm and an infectious smile made. It seemed like someone close had died and people are questioning if success and money can be trusted as a factor for happiness, amongst many other questions about why he did it.

I had not watched any movie of his but had seen some of his interviews by chance and I remember mentioning to a friend how sad his eyes looked and she mockingly laughed. But sad were those eyes, and maybe as a therapist I read more into facial expressions etc. but that's a distinct thought I had back then.

Since then, there is a huge protest and many people in Bollywood are blaming top guns like Karan Johar and the Khans and nepotism to be the cause of his suicide. Petitions are also being signed in Pakistan to ban the aforementioned.

The fact is that pinning this suicide to lost opportunities due to nepotism in Bollywood is a very narrow-minded way of looking at it. Let's try to understand what suicide is, which is a very complex and multifactorial phenomenon.

One of the leading causes of suicide is chronic depression and those silently suffering from untreated diagnosed depression and chronic anxiety are at a higher risk. Also, it would be helpful to understand that self-harming tendencies are present in the individual for quite some time in most cases or suicide ideation which is the presence of thoughts regarding suicide.

When I do suicide risk assessment for my clients who are at a risk, I am looking at whether the client has a passive thought 'I would rather die' or a specific suicide plan, which is a red alert. Having said this, I can't disregard the passive idea either and no mental health practitioner can be fully sure when working with such clients if they will commit or not.

There are predisposing factors dating back to early childhood trauma, familial depression, unhappy early years that were never processed in therapy or spoken of otherwise. Later precipitating factors such as adult life stresses whether loss of a loving relationship, job loss, and financial crisis can be strong triggers for wanting to end one's life. It's very rare that only an adult life...