What makes desperate families adopt suicide as ‘escape’?

What makes desperate families adopt suicide as ‘escape’?

• Mental health experts explain how diseased mind perceives and rationalises the extreme act • Identify socio-economic distress, anguish, despair and mental health conditions as key factors • Stress that psychiatric conditions are treatable with therapy and medication KARACHI: How could one spouse persuade the other to participate in a joint suicide and kill their own children? Two recent incidents in Karachi, in which parents allegedly killed their own children and a household member before ending their own lives, make answering this troubling question particularly urgent. In September, the decomposed bodies of a doctor, his wife and their three daughters were found in a locked apartment in Ahsanabad. This month, five members of another family were found dead inside a locked portion in Gulshan-i-Hadeed. While investigations are still underway, police authorities treat both cases as suspected murder-suicides. When mental health experts were asked to address this troubling question of how someone could persuade their spouse to participate in such an extreme act, they explained the psychiatric and psychological conditions that could lead up to such acts. The experts also pointed to severe socio-economic distress, rising unemployment, and a lack of accessible crisis support systems. Speaking to Dawn, senior psychiatrist and retired Brigadier Dr Shoaib Ahmed, Executive Director of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan Institute of Behavioural Sciences of Dow University of Health Sciences, said: “When someone is moving towards suicide, their mind does not work the way a mentally healthy person’s mind does. “In such cases, when couples find themselves completely overwhelmed by severe poverty and relentless socioeconomic issues, they often reach a breaking point,” he said, adding: “The amount of pressure and the multitude of issues become too much for them to deal with, which is why they move towards suicide.” Addressing the specific nature of joint suicides, Dr Ahmed discussed suicide pacts — an agreement made between more than one individual facing extreme distress. He said that while such occurrences happen worldwide under severe circumstances, they stem from a profound sense of helplessness. “In extreme cases, couples not only choose to end their own lives to escape a world of torment but also tragically decide to take their children’s lives as well, in what they perceive as an act of mercy killing,” the senior psychiatrist said. Driven by despair, they rationalise that leaving their children behind without any parental support in a painful world would only expose them to further suffering, effectively viewing the devastating act through a distorted lens of mercy, Dr Ahmed added. The senior psychiatrist warned that financial pressures, job drain among educated professionals, and escalating poverty are pushing individuals to the brink of hopelessness. However, Dr Ahmed added that the psychiatric conditions are treatable with therapy and medication. ‘Susceptibility’ Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist Dr Usama Bin Zubair believes that brain chemistry can play a role in suicidal thoughts, but suicide is rarely explained by “brain chemistry alone”. Responding to Dawn queries on the telephone, the CEO of Pakistan Institute of Mental Health, Rawalpindi, explained biological, psychological and social factors behind such suicides. “The issue spans biological, psychological, and social dimensions,” Dr Zubair said. Shedding light on suicide pacts and cult suicides, in which even hundreds of people die by suicide together, he said that there is also the concept of rational suicide. “In rational suicide, couples mutually decide that their life’s hardships have become far greater than death itself,” Dr Zubair explained. It is a situation where a person believes, after thinking about their circumstances, that ending their life is a logical or reasonable choice. He said personality factors also play a critical role, including susceptibility, where one partner suggests the act and the other possesses a personality inclined to follow. ‘Contagious anxiety’ Responding to the question of why neither partner in a couple would stop the other from carrying out such an act, senior Clinical Psychologist and Counsellor Atia Fareed spoke about contagious anxiety and shared psychological distress, explaining the dynamics of joint suicide pacts. “Anxiety is often considered a contagious, catching illness in our society. If someone is dealing with mental health issues in a household, its effects invariably bleed into the lives of everyone living there,” the psychologist warned. “When both partners are suffering from extreme mental agony, neither is capable of pulling the other out of danger. Instead of offering hope, they can drag each other deeper into despair because both individuals become so profoundly incapacitated that neither is in a position to help the other.” She said that growing hopelessness can compel a couple to validate each other’s destructive thoughts. However, she added that the recent Karachi incidents constitute a “murder-suicide” by an individual rather than a collective “mass suicide”. “True mass suicide requires mutual consensus among all participants,” the clinical psychologist stressed. Dominant personality or mental illness “There are two possibilities. Both individuals may be experiencing mental illness, though not necessarily to the same degree,” said senior Psychiatrist Dr Syed Abdurrehman. Alternatively, one person’s mental illness may cause significant stress for the other family members, creating a shared psychological impact, added the managing director of the Karachi Psychiatric Hospital. “The dominant personality in a family can also influence others. A husband can affect his wife, just as a mother can affect her children”. He added that when parents decide that the entire family should die, it may be because both are experiencing mental illness, or because one person’s strong psychological influence affects the other. “Brain chemical imbalances or any other cause, like genetic inheritance of a disease, are also very major causes,” Dr Abdurrehman added. Social and economic pressures Psychiatrist Dr Bilal Zafar also agreed with the experts’ views. The director of Willing Ways, originally founded as Sadaqat Clinic, said severe financial crises, debt, profound loneliness, despair, and a sense of helplessness could drive people to take such drastic steps. “A disturbed brain understands this as the only way out — to end life,” Dr Bilal Zafar added. “Secondly, husbands and wives have a deep relationship. The thoughts of one can affect the other. If one is hopeless, the other automatically absorbs that hopelessness by watching them and also becomes hopeless.” While financial pressures are significant stressors, reducing complex mental health crises strictly to economic factors is misleading and dangerous, the expert added. The experts believe that in such cases, families and friends often overlook warning signs such as social withdrawal, isolation, and significant changes in behaviour. Families and friends bear a critical responsibility to monitor their loved ones for such symptoms, they added. They also stress the need to move past social stigmas, maintain open lines of communication with distressed loved ones, and ensure access to affordable, professional psychiatric help before minor psychological struggles escalate into crises. Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2026