Suicide on Social Media

The Bumthang double suicide incident was terribly unfortunate. It has been bothering me for days like it must be doing to many people across the country. While I don't know what to feel about the two misguided victims, my heart goes out to the parents who would be half dead in grief, and wondering where they went wrong in bringing up their children. They will often ask why their child disregarded them and left them for a stranger whom the child just knew for a year in the school. They will forever hang on to the shattered pieces of hope and seek silent answers. What was their fault?

In the midst of this painful event, the leakage of the depressing picture of the victims into the unforgiving social media must have devastated the family members. The pain of having to see it on social media, to know that everybody is watching the death of their child, will kill them piece by piece.

While I strongly condemn the sharing of the picture of the victims, and extend my appreciation to the many responsible and learned people who came forward to fight the spread of the picture that day, I think that the picture was a loud alarm clock to many strong policies that are sleeping in the pages of thick books.

There are three things that the unfortunate incident has fortunately brought to the national focus:

1. Suicide in Bhutan

Suicide among Bhutanese was long seeking attention from us but we weren't so passionate about dealing with it, at least I haven't seen anything significant happening to take care of it. Great many things must be happening in papers but this photo has finally told everybody that it's time take things beyond books and meetings.

2. Ugliness of Suicide

Suicide is murder of self, when your friend commits suicide, he kills your friend, he is a murderer, he should be hated and ridiculed but among us we share so much of compassion for the murderers, going to the extent of paying tribute, writing poems, singing songs... which I fear has glorified the idea of suicide. But the depressing picture has shown the true and ugly picture that suicide is.

3. Social Media Invasion 

The police did a good job by responded very promptly on the distribution of the picture on social media that very day, already today they have tracked down the person who has started it all. He was a health worker who was part of the investigation team. What are the charges against him? Does he even know that it was illegal?
Some of us will have the heart to know that it's wrong to do that but how many of us know that it's a punishable offence?
It's not very long since we dealt with case of sharing of homemade sex videos via mobile apps, some of which are already in the court of law. But I am still wondering how they will be charged and how that will help solve the future problems.
We are already under invasion from the social media and more than what happens in life will be reflected online. It's time we take social media seriously, define it and educate people on the netiquettes before the next big disaster happens.