With the recent occurrence of suicide incidents in the country, especially amongst the youth I decided to investigate the psychology behind it.
The recent cases all involved students who blamed failure in their exams as the motivation for their suicide so I decided to find out if IQ played a part in suicide .
Many online have also speculated that there’s a correlation between high IQs and suicide, as a higher IQ
causes the person deal with complex challenges in life.
Animals rarely commit suicide. So why do we? Perhaps the cause of our own species suicide is that we are the only creatures aware of our
mortality and the responsibility of our survival.
A few hundred years ago, life was different. It was simpler. Our sense of ‘individuality’ was way less than it is now. For instance, if you were born into a carpenter family you
had to be a carpenter as well. That’s how it worked out.
But slowly, as our society has evolved, and we’ve been given the
responsibility for our destinies and futures, we are told that we can
become anything we want if we try hard enough. Thus, our lives have
become much more troublesome. Freedom can become a burden.
Freedom of choice places the whole blame and regret of failure on the shoulders of the individual. In the old Indian cast system, for
example, suicides were almost non-existent. An untouchable never aspired to become a Brahman, rather, he accepted his
cast, and his main concern was to find food and shelter. There was no time to worry about depression and suicide.
These days, intelligent people can truly see the magnitude of the scope of possibilities available to them, more than the rest of people around them. This causes them to see through many of the fallacies of society and the meaninglessness of the routine existences and pursuits we all value so dearly.
Martin Voracek, a researcher at the University of Vienna Medical School makes a claim that may shed some light on the suicides of scientists. His startling theory is that suicide can be positively correlated with intelligence — in other words, the smarter people are, the more likely they are to kill themselves.
To back up his theory, Voracek has taken the controversial tables of national average IQ values published recently by Professor Richard Lynn and his colleague at the University of Ulster, Tatu Vanhanen. But instead of correlating these IQ levels with national GDP per head (as provocatively, Lynn and Vanhanen have), Voracek has compared the various IQ averages with national suicide rates.
The results are, prima facie,impressive: there is a strong correlation between suicide rates and national average IQ in most of the countries surveyed.
For instance, Jamaica, with a low average IQ of 72, has suicide rates of 0.5 for men and 0.2 for women (all suicide figures are per 100,000 person-years). Albania, with an average IQ of 90, has low suicide rates of 2.9 and 1.7. Germany by contrast, with its average IQ of 102, has suicide rates of 21.8 and 8.3;
Japan, with an average IQ of 105, has suicide rates of 25 and 12.
Wherever you look, and whatever the culture, the same pattern can be seen: in Azerbaijan, Greece, Kuwait and Chile there are lower average IQ levels and lower suicide rates; in Austria, Korea, Singapore and Norway there are higher average IQ levels and higher suicide rates. One exception is the UK, with a relatively high average
IQ (100) and a relatively low (at least for the West) suicide rate — 11 for men and 3.3 for women.
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