The article below from The New Straits Times touched me immensely. Suicide- filicide, u name it, I think we all should ponder on why this seems to be such a common occurrence of late. Such incidences were almost unheard of when family closeness was a norm and not an exception and members of a particular community look out for one another, regardless of race, colour or belief. Yes, you may hear about the occasional suicide, but filicide? God forbid.
Whatever happened to us?
We are emotional creatures. All these problems stem from emotional upheavals. Stress from the everyday demands of this modern life – Living beyond one’s means, Ah Long, husband’s affair with another woman, and the list goes on.
Whatever happened to our spirituality and moral values. Almost all faiths abhor suicide. Has spirituality taken a back seat, materialism now is the God for a majority of us.
Meanwhile, the importance of support cannot be stressed enough. Yes the PM just launched a counselling campaign- but how thorough is that. Would counseling be enough when it only grazes the surface. Counselling should come from the heart. How can an attempt such as this be a success when we are generally raised within a culture where judging people and isolating people who are different from us, is the norm. At the end of the day, for any measure to be successful, it should be founded on the genuine intention to help fellow humans and not just to sweep problems under the carpet and embellish them with what seem like impressive but in truth are hollow programs.
After all the prophet p.b.u.h. once said:
"Actions are (judged) by motives (niyyah), so each man will have what he intended…”
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Kathirasen on Sunday: The heart weeps but the mind is thankful
25 Feb 2007
Kathirasen
HOW could she? O my God! It’s horrible! These were among the exclamations that burst through the lips of relatives and friends last week.
They were agonising over the death of two children. Every death is tragic but this tragedy was made more unbearable by the news that their own mother was said to have strangled them.
And it came so soon after the case of a man who strangled his two children before committing suicide.
It is incomprehensible. Why would a mother want to kill her children? Why would a father snatch away the life that he helped bring into the world?
How could they do it? I’m sure when the mother strangled her sleeping children — one at a time — they must have awakened as they struggled for breath.
Their terrified eyes would have met her eyes. Perhaps, as the life was being squeezed out of them, they were trying to fathom the reason for their mother’s madness. Or perhaps the shock of it suffocated any attempt at thinking.
And what was passing in the mind of the mother?
Only days earlier, on Feb 14, jobless Lee Thian Sing strangled May Shan, 10, and Wei Shen, 9, before taking his own life by drinking bleach and washing liquid.
It happened in the daytime. They would have been awake as he murdered them. Did they struggle? Did their bodies convulse in contortions as they writhed in agonising disbelief? What terrified thoughts tumbled through their innocent minds as the hands that had comforted them were now wringing the life out of them?
Lee left a note saying he did it because he did not want his children ending up as failures like him.
His moment of madness is believed to have come about shortly after a tiff with his wife.
On Feb 22, labourer M. Murthy, 29, was charged at the Klang magistrate’s court with murdering his two-year-old son Ruthren in January. The child is said to have been beaten and kicked to death.
On Dec 1 last year, Seah Wong Chong and Kau Mei Lin fed rat poison to their children Siew Cheung, 12, Siew Man, 10, and Siew Tong.
The children died but the couple was reported to have failed in their attempt to take their own lives. They said harassment by loan sharks drove them to it.
Last July, K. Sangeetha, 30, collected her four children and stood in front of a Singapore-bound express train. Her eldest daughter,
Killing of a child by a parent. It’s called filicide.
Cases such as that involving Lee are classified by psychiatrists as "altruistic filicide" because the parent thinks he is actually saving his children from real or imagined suffering by killing them. Studies in the West show that the majority of filicide-suicides are "altruistic".
It was reported that the mother who allegedly killed her two children in
Those who have read about Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece would be familiar with queen Medea. When Jason abandoned her for a princess, she killed their two children to spite him.
Martha Ann Johnson of the
What triggers the horrendous act? What makes such parents snap? Psychiatrists usually blame it on stress and pressure. Behavioural scientists hold that violent behaviour has no single cause but is the result of an accumulation of factors, including childhood experiences.
Neuroscientists may conclude that a breakdown in communication between the limbic system of the brain and the frontal cortex could have caused emotional information to be incorrectly processed. Or they might point to a possible malfunction of the amygdala, that tiny almond-shaped mass of grey matter where fear and aggression arise.
It may be that even the perpetrators of this atrocity would be unable to say what drove them to this instant of insanity.
What is clear is that we who hear about it are shocked. We are horrified. And that, I think, is good.
Because it means that such incidences are rare; because if they were an everyday affair or even a frequent occurrence, our hearts would have become numb to them. We would not be shocked.
When I see that for every mother who suffocates her child, for every father who kills his child, there are millions more who don’t, my faith in parents is restored. The vast majority take reasonable care of their children; many shower love and affection.
While my heart weeps for the children who were killed, my mind is thankful that these are but instances of aberrant behaviour.
Children belong in families, which, ideally, serve as a sanctuary and a cushion from the world at large. Parents belong to society and are a part of that greater world. Sometimes parents are a channel to the larger society, sometimes they are a shield from it. Ideally they act as filters, guiding their children and teaching them to avoid the tempting trash. — Louise Hart
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