The age group between 25 and 29 years old concentrates the highest incidence rate of suicides at the national level, a situation that is replicated in Yucatan at the state level, Laura Hernández Ruiz announced in the presentation of the book Geographical and Statistical Atlas for the Analysis of Suicide in the Yucatan Peninsula, within the framework of the Yucatan International Reading Fair (Filey) 2022.
(La Jornada Maya).- Hernández Ruiz, a graduate in modern English literature, with a master’s degree in applied linguistics, and a doctorate in anthropology in the area of linguistics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), announced that the information contained in the atlas was compiled from the printed press. The advantage of doing it this way is that “the newspapers give us information within a context, they give us data on the suicide cases, the towns, the municipalities, the socio-economic situation of the subject”.
“This makes it possible to search for the reasons or causes that led the person to take the decision to take their own life. Normally the figures obtained through the press disagree with those published by the Institute of Geography and Statistics (Inegi). The book is divided into four sections, beginning with the Yucatan Peninsula in general, followed by Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatan. It includes maps with different data and covers the years 2010 to 2015”, -assured the researcher- .
“The age group with the highest suicide rate (in Yucatan) is 25 to 29 years old, followed by 20 to 24 and 30 to 34. This is a productive stage where economic independence and achievements in life are expected. personal goals in self-realization: work, housing, among many others”, highlighted Laura Hernández Ruiz when presenting a table that includes figures from 2010 to 2020.
It is striking that this group of 25 to 29 years old presents an increase of 61 percent in cases of suicide; from 35 to 39 years old grew 66 percent; from 65 to 69, grew 80 percent and from 75 to 79, 150 percent. However, she limited, that the percentages are high do not necessarily imply large numbers in terms of registered cases.
She indicated that men are using more forceful methods to end their life. In Yucatan, the number of men who committed suicide in 2010 was 172 and in 2020, 186; suicidal women totaled 37 in 2010 and 60 in 2020. “We can see that the percentage of male suicides increased by 8 percent and that of women by 62 percent.
Regarding the relationship between population growth and sustained growth in the suicide rate, Yucatan registers numbers well below the national ones. In all of Mexico, population growth was 12 percent and the suicide rate 57 percent, while in Yucatan it was 18 percent and 17 percent, respectively. This fact, highlighted the specialist, “says that something is being done well” by the agencies and organizations that work to prevent suicide cases.
She said that there are characteristics that interrelate the three states of the peninsula, for example the discovery of oil deposits in Campeche and the boom in tourist activity in Quintana Roo and Yucatan.
“These situations placed the region at a geostrategic point to boost regional and national development, but these changes did not necessarily translate into possibilities for sustained regional development, since we found social and economic problems such as gender violence, alcoholism, expansion of inequalities, delinquency and of course, suicide”, Hernández Ruiz concluded.
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