Paris Jackson, the 15-year-old daughter of deceased music legend Michael Jackson, tried to end her life by slashing her wrist some time ago. Strikingly another young actor in India, Jiah Khan, took away her life by hanging herself. Statistics reveal that for every suicide or attempt brought into notice, some four to five attempts happen simultaneously without coming to anybody’s notice.

Suicide is committed alike by men and women, but our stereotypical thoughts take men to be stronger and hence braver to face tough situations or be able to at least refrain from getting sentimentally broken -- hence many women, the thinking goes, take their lives. Men take their lives too, but the reasons women end their own lives are different in many ways. And charts show men and women committing suicide to be at par with each other, however, women have varied reasons, mainly stress and pressure exerted by others they cannot handle.

In Afghanistan, women commit suicide to get out from marriages they do not like because they cannot escape the brutal domination of men who try and control every sphere of their lives. Also sometimes they do so to not marry the men they are compelled to marry. This is just one reference; women in every part of the world end up taking their own lives as a result of dominance by other people, especially members of the family. They are forced into decisions made by other people with little or no freedom to have their own say. When they reach a point of no return, with not even a possible narrow escape, as a result, they kill themselves.

Coming back to Paris Jackson, the teenager tried to end her life because she was stressed with her life and many tragedies and troubles that came flooding upon her when her father passed away. Women as we know are not too tough to endure too much psychological stress at once, be it emotional stress at workplace, school, college, and strenuous life schedule which when piled with bigger tragedies that happen like passing of a family member, victim of bullying or harassment, some kind of failure at work, school or college simply add to the burden which then becomes difficult for any person to tolerate. In this competitive world where one is supposed to prove herself to be better than the others every minute, stress builds in and adds on to other issues. Moreover, it has been concluded that when someone is going through so many untold woes, it gets suffocating and just a trigger moment is what is needed to come to this end point- suicide.

Suicide is not a new issue as it has been there always, both in literature and real world. Strong emotions that people cannot get rid of take their lives. Guilt, regret, distress, agony, pain, suffering, poverty, misery and extreme stage of sorrow engulf the good and happy and diffuse into an individual’s mind, body and intellect and people see death as the only way out of the mess they are tolerating. However, suicide is under reported widely because people fear being blamed, held up in hassles or are too sad by the untimely death of loved ones that they cannot get themselves to complain.

It takes a lot of courage to kill anyone, particularly yourself. Ironically people who commit suicide are weak and cannot face adverse situations, lose all hopes of a happy life and finally lose precious lives. One lifetime is enough for people to recognize and amend their mistakes or failures or avenge for themselves. Wrong decisions can be righted and life can be brought back to the correct track. Killing yourself is the ultimate end and will release one from all the tragedies in life but why not stay back a bit and try and make up for what we’ve erred. We need to live just long enough to see what happens to the ones that try to kill us, criticize us, hurt us, shun us, downgrade us, do injustice to us and make us feel bad about ourselves. Being alive, in itself, is a hope that can have so many happy outcomes no matter what we do, face or deal with.