Indonesia’s teen suicide problem and what to do about it
- Activists and social welfare advocates fear not enough is being done to prevent the tragedy of Indonesian adolescents committing suicide
- A 2015 survey found 5.4 per cent of Indonesian teens had considered killing themselves in the previous 12 months, and nearly 4 per cent had tried
One Saturday morning in January, when Arif returned home from a fishing trip, his mother-in-law asked him to check on his young sister-in-law, who was in her room.
He knocked on the 13-year-old’s bedroom door several times but got no answer. “I thought she must have passed out because she hadn’t had breakfast,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking anything suspicious at all.”
Finally, Arif asked his brother-in-law to help him break down the door, but they couldn’t get it open. He got a chair so he could peek through the gap between the bedroom wall and the ceiling. “That’s when I saw her hanging,” Arif says.
The young girl had killed herself.
“My youngest daughter hardly talked to any of us, her own family, about her personal life,” the girl’s father says. “We only learned from her diary that she had been bullied at school. We never knew that until after she died.”
