Look through a newspaper or magazine on almost any day of the week and you can read about someone committing suicide. Suicide is clearly a major problem in society today.
According to Department of Health statistics, however, the suicide rate in Taiwan has remained more or less stable over the last decade, at six or seven suicides per 100,000 of the population.
Whether it is just an impression created by more reports in the news, or whether the number of suicides really is growing, the fact is that far more people in Taiwan kill themselves than the statistics ever show, because in many cases the cause of death is recorded as something other than suicide.
On the one hand there is no insurance payout for suicide, and on the other hand there is the social stigma that attaches to the family of someone who was desperate enough to kill themselves. As a result, the fact of suicide is often covered up. Professor Hu You-wei of the Yangming University Institute of Health and Welfare once conducted a survey of emergency ward admissions at a large teaching hospital in Taiwan, and found that fully one half of the patients treated for accidental poisoning or injury were in fact "suicide attempts."
Psychiatrist Chiang Han-kuang of Triservice General Hospital says that the hospital knows of three cases in the last 15 years in which the self-inflicted death of a patient was recorded as something other than suicide.
"The parents of a university student knelt down in my office and begged me not to write 'suicide' as the cause of their son's death," he recalls, and finally he had to write "failure of the central nervous system." "If death can be misattributed when it occurrs in hospital, then how much more must that be true of deaths that occur elsewhere?"
It was not long ago that the celebrity Yu Feng hanged herself, and yet on the official report the cause of death is also attributed to "failure of the central nervous system."
Some suicides are also hidden among the figures for accidental death. There is a grey area between accidental death and suicide in which it is hard to tell which is which, but in many cases suicide is deliberately disguised as accident, and recorded as "accidental drowning," or "fall from a height."
Disguised suicides certainly account partially for the fact that accidents are the third leading cause of death in Taiwan.
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