School of Occupational Therapy and Social Work Making sense of suicides by school students in Bhutan: documenting a societal dialogue Sonam Pelden This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University July 2016 Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgment has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Human Ethics (For projects involving human participants/tissue, etc) The research presented and reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) – updated March 2014, and received human research ethics approval from the Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee (EC00262), Approval Number #.HR 84/2013 Signature: Date: 14-07-2016 i Acknowledgments I am not if You are not I am because You are. To my supervisor Angela Fielding, you are a Superwoman and this journey would not have been possible without your extraordinary faith in my abilities, and kindness that surpasses words of gratitude. I cannot thank you enough for being present by putting aside and pulling through some of your most difficult times. I have no words to say how much that meant to me. My heartfelt gratitude to you for never giving up on me. You will always have a special place in my heart, and in my prayers. My gratitude to Ian D. Percy for providing constant guidance and feedback. Thank you for always finding time for me and for wanting the best for me. I have utmost respects for you and have always looked upon you as my mentor and teacher. My appreciation to Frances Crawford for starting me off on this journey as my first Supervisor. I am in awe of your vibrant energy and intelligence, thank you for setting a mark for me to achieve. While I lived almost an unrecognizable life in a different place with varied lifestyle, you have both had to make sacrifices so that I could live my dream. Thank you to my parents Wangchuk and Yeshey for your selfless love and unwavering support. My boundless love and pure gratitude to you both for being there for me, for loving me and for believing in me. My two kid brothers Wangchen and Sangay, my little uncle Penjor, my forever friend and aunt Ugyen, and my loving sister-in-laws thank you for telling me I that I can do anything, I believed and became because you did. Thank you for never ceasing to see the best in me and pampering me with your love. To my ii grandmother Dema, for your relentless prayers and love, I am sorry I have not been able to be around you, but I love you dearly. To the other cheerleaders in my life, my friends Nuri and Sonam Tashi for being present to listen to my qualms, for believing in me, and thank you for being excited about this thesis on my behalf. Thanks to Jo and Julie for proofreading, and for comments that moved my writing. Julie, you are my epitome of love- I can never thank you enough for your love, how I looked forward to our rich conversations in your beautiful apartment. The yummy food, and our drifting discussions that loosened me up and opened my mind to new possibilities of writing and composing. My colleagues Madam Tashi Pelzom, Director Chencho Dorji, and Madam Secretary Sangay Zam from MoE Bhutan for your support and faith in my work. Thank you for encouraging me to step forward to be a student again and continuing support even at a distance. Thank you to all the participants who generously contributed to this thesis. Your voices and faces have remained to guide me throughout my journey. I have cried with you and with your voices, but I have also smiled with joy and hope. My gratitude for the lessons and hope you evoked in me. The Australian government for the Postgraduate Endeavour scholarship, thank you for giving me my dream. To every Australian, who contributed toward these scholarships, I offer my heartfelt gratitude, you raise us to the stars, and recreate beautiful lives. I am also grateful to the staff of the School of Occupational Therapy & Social Work for the support you have provided in these four years. Finally, thank you to my friend Professor Rodrigo, for your timely arrival, support and help with formatting. Your super skills saved many laborious hours and weariness. With the deepest gratitude. iii Abstract This research uses a narrative inquiry approach to explore and stage a Bhutanese community dialogue on the recent troubling rise in suicides by school students. Forty-four individual interviews and seven group interviews were conducted. The voices of secondary school students, key policymakers, a parent, school principals, school guidance counsellors, and a Buddhist teacher represent the Bhutanese education community. A community dialogue on suicide is timely and illustrates that collective efforts can generate systemic changes. iv Prologue I recollect my personal story from the past which has been the impetus in choosing to undertake this research. I immerse myself in memories, placing myself back in time to recall answers I seek now as an adult. Time had let those memories slink away into silence; perhaps they did not have a purpose in my life until I kept hearing news of suicides by adolescents. The news of a thirteen-year-old school girl who had brutally killed herself by using an electric wire around her neck struck me with worry for other young adolescents. I started wondering what possible reasons or despair would drive them to undertake such painful acts. There were rumours that she had failed in her exams and feared going home to her family that day. She didn't want to tell her family that she failed in her exams. At that moment a part of me could relate to that heart-wrenching fear; of being chided, of that desperate hopelessness in your parents’ eyes, and fear of becoming a burden to your loved ones. I can’t remember if I was eleven years, but it feels close to that age, when I hid behind my grandmother’s bedroom door, like most days when I would be in sheer anguish and desperate tears, wanting to rip apart every fabric I could grasp. But at that moment, nothing felt enough, the gnawing thought of wanting to disappear from whatever was occurring around me was strong. I remember the old cupboard with multiple cabinets next to the door. Each cabinet opened toward the front like a window with tiny metal latches, and each window looked like a door painted in traditional art. But none of those mattered when I opened the top cabinet to grab a bottle of medicine, which was in powder form and swallowed. I am sure nothing happened because my memory fades after that. But my second memory haunted me for a while and perhaps through this story I can relate to versions of some who did not survive what I survived. I was 15 years v old, and my class 10 result was due the next day, I knew I did not study well enough. My father was worried. He said 'if you can’t get through to a college scholarship you can join the teacher training college (which I dreaded then), and if you fail then you can stay at home’. Hearing this, and knowing I did not have many options, I was scared. I must have had about Ngultrum 20 (Bhutanese currency) in my cheap fawn coloured purse. In the evening before the results day, I walked to our local drug store to buy two strips (with ten tablets each) of sleeping pills. It was very cheap. At the store, I was scared that I would be refused and questioned, but none of that happened. I walked home with a sense of triumph for securing the pills; 20 sleeping pills tucked away in my pocket. I slept in fear but also comfort thinking at least I have the tablets. That night I slept with the pills under my pillow and a mug of water next to my bed. The plan was to wait for my exam results in the morning and if it was the worst, I thoughts pills were an easy, painless option. I was saved by my aunt pulling me out of the bed at 6.30 am congratulating me for passing and securing top marks. Years later, as an adult, I narrated this incident casually to a close friend of mine who is not a Bhutanese. She was stunned and asked “but why would you think of doing that? Did you think you saw it in the movies or read about it somewhere? How could such a young brain think of killing oneself instead of doing something else?” These questions made me more curious too. And I give textual life to these memories of the past fearing and hoping this may pass silently without the notice of my parents, for I know this will hurt them. They never knew of these attempts, just as many tiny naughty stories hidden from our loved parents, this one is too. But if they come to glance over here, let them know this that the pain of seeing them grieve over me is far greater to fathom. And this I realized as I matured with time, that we mean more than numbers, ambitions, careers to our parents, and I learnt to preserve, survive and nurture instead.