Heed the black hole of despair

South Africans tend to believe that the most likely ways you will die in our violent, lawless country would be in a car crash, or at the hands of violent criminals.

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Yet, just released data on life insurance payouts by Discovery Life shows that suicide is the biggest cause of unnatural deaths among its clients.

At the outset, it must be pointed out that the data relates to Discovery Life's clients who, by virtue of having a life insurance policy, would probably be settled people in employment, so perhaps not representative of a broad cross-section of South Africans.