Depression Is Behind Mass Family Suicides

On Tuesday, a businessman, his wife and manager jumped to death from their eighth-floor apartment in Ghaziabad’s Indirapuram. Before taking the extreme step, the couple had killed their two minor children too.

- Chayyanika Nigam

The daughter was strangulated to death, while the son’s throat was slit to kill him. The family’s pet rabbit was also found dead in the same room as the children. Cops said the couple had suffered huge business losses.

The businessman had made an early-morning video call to a friend, showed him his two dead children and said that ‘everything was finished’. “Around 5 am, residents in their building called the cops when guards heard the sounds of the three ​bodies falling on the ground,” said Ghaziabad’s Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Sudhir Kumar Singh.

The quiet neighbourhood near the National Capital woke up to shock and horror on a chilly winter morning, but it wasn’t a oneoff case in the region.

In fact, a growing incidence of depression, caused by financial hopelessness, besides professional and relationship discords, has triggered a horrific spree of killings and mass suicides in Delhi-NCR families, top experts have found out.

EXTREME STEPS

In Ghaziabad itself, a former director of a pharmaceutical company killed his wife with a hammer and poisoned his three daughters, including a three-year-old, to death before committing suicide in July.