HOW DRU CATCH SEES IT

The Policy That Punishes Survival

Nigeria's Senate President showed up to a debate on the Suicide Prevention Bill and accidentally made the strongest possible argument for why it needs to pass. According to Prof. Atilola's analysis in Vanguard News, Senator Akpabio declared that a person who survives a suicide attempt should either have succeeded - or go to prison. A person who has just survived the worst moment of their life now has a new item on their to-do list: retain a lawyer.

Two Laws, One Country, Zero Consistency

The institutional absurdity here is load-bearing. Nigeria's Criminal Code Act already punishes attempted suicide under Section 327. The National Mental Health Act of 2021 - passed by the same Nigerian state - formally recognises the importance of compassionate intervention in mental health emergencies. So the country simultaneously holds that you deserve care and that you deserve prosecution. The left hand is writing a therapy referral while the right hand drafts an arrest warrant.

The WHO has put this plainly: criminalization functions as an obstacle to prevention, because fear of prosecution stops people from seeking help. If you are already in crisis and the legal system's official position is that you should have finished the job, you are not going to walk into a hospital and announce your situation. You will go silent. And silence, in a mental health crisis, is how people die - which is, remarkably, the outcome the law was supposedly designed to prevent.

Fifty-Nine Countries and Counting

Prof. Atilola notes that at least 59 countries have decriminalised suicide attempts globally, including six African neighbors - Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zambia and Botswana. Nigeria would not be inventing anything. It would simply be stopping a policy that, by the WHO's own assessment, kills the people it claims to protect. Senator Akpabio's intervention suggests that the primary obstacle to this change is not evidence, not public opinion and not medical consensus. It is the peculiar logic that surviving something terrible is itself a punishable offense.