Trying To Stop Suicide: Guyana Aims To Bring Down Its High Rate
Editor's note: This piece discusses suicide. If you have experienced suicidal thoughts or have lost someone to suicide and want to seek help, you can contact the Crisis Text Line by texting "START" to 741-741 or call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.
In February 2016, Govin Munswami considered killing himself.
He had just returned to his family farm after visiting his wife, Amanda, in the hospital.
The morning before, she had showered and left home to visit her mother. As she approached her front gate, she realized she forgot her purse. She turned around, went back inside her house to retrieve it and attempted suicide.
Her husband sat by her hospital bed for seven days as she lay dying. He listened as she apologized. She said that she had made a mistake and couldn't explain her motive.
Just six months prior, Munswami's mother, Yvonne, took her own life after a fight with her husband, Munswami's father, who succumbed to a fatal heart attack the next day.
Before his mother died, Munswami was able to speak with her and ask her why she did it.
"She said she didn't know why," remembers Munswami, a 31-year-old teacher with a sturdy build and solemn stare. He says that both women told him they had acted impulsively in a moment of despair and expressed regret for their decisions.
Faced with these losses, Munswami felt compelled to take his own life. But then he thought about his wife. Before she died, she had asked him for two things: to forgive her and to finish his degree.
"I'm still here," he says. "Although life has been rough, every day is a new day of your life."
Munswami has begun to speak out against suicide in his rural community of Black Bush Polder, known by many as the "suicide belt" of the small Caribbean nation of
