The Solution to the West’s Suicide Epidemic Can Be Found in the Culture of a Himalayan People

In recent years, the number of suicides among young people has skyrocketed. In some countries, such as Spain, suicides have already surpassed traffic accidents as the leading cause of death not caused by illness—and among the young, they are the main cause of death in every sense.

In my recent book on suicide, I cite the words of psychologist James Hillman: “The mind sometimes needs to kill, and it will not stop until it succeeds.” I also warn that this death is psychological. In other words, the mind sometimes needs to destroy a situation that causes it anguish in order to continue living a healthy life in the future.

As I also point out in that book, this psychological death—or rather, these psychological deaths—were carried out in traditional societies through rites of passage. Through rituals that mixed fear, violence, and abandonment, people felt they were killing their former self to be reborn into a new one. It is no coincidence that many of these rites took place in dark huts or caves, associating the end of the ritual with a new birth. Today it would be impossible to revive such rites; having lost faith, they would be empty ceremonies.

But there are other ways to kill the self without killing the person—ways to end everything that makes us feel like abandoning life, without actually abandoning it—and the solution comes from the culture of the Naxi minority in China, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas.

For many years, anthropologists have characterized this society by its preservation of traditional culture (including its pictographic Dongba script) and its high rate of suicide among young people, who were said to protest arranged marriages in this way.

However, testimonies I collected during my own fieldwork among this minority suggest that most of these suicides were not suicides at all. They were only staged. In reality, the couple fled to the nearby Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, with its hard-to-reach valleys, and instead of hanging themselves, taking poison, or jumping off a cliff, they went on living together. For several years they endured a harsh life high in the mountains, and after a suitable period—already holding in their arms the child born of their love—they returned home. The joy of seeing them alive again outweighed all social considerations.

They show us that it is possible to kill the “present self” without killing the person, and they offer an example—both to young and old—of the human capacity to find a way out of situations that seem to have none.

To learn more, you can read my book: The Culture of Suicide in China and the Fall of the Imperial Regime.(Spanish language).