12-yr-old Delhi boy dies aping TV serial suicide

Twelve-year-old Mohammad Sohail was addicted to crime serials on television and convinced that one comes back to life after committing suicide. His belief turned fatal. HT reports.

Twelve-year-old Mohammad Sohail was addicted to crime serials on television and convinced that one comes back to life after committing suicide. His belief turned fatal.

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Sohail climbed on a pile of four chairs and hung himself from a ceiling fan with his mother’s dupatta on Tuesday.

He was alone at his home in Maujpur, northeast Delhi, at that time.

Sohail’s father Mohammad Salim said the boy had probably tried to copy a TV episode from February 4 in which a woman died in a similar way.

Sohail, his family said, had watched many crime serials in which an actor shown committing suicide in one episode performed a new role in the next. The Class 5 student of an MCD school took this to believe that the actor had come back to life.

“Sohail was very curious to know if there was life after death. After watching the episode on February 4, he had asked if he would die after hanging himself in a similar way,” said Salim, a factory worker in Maujpur.

“I scolded him for asking this. I would always tell him that TV is all drama,” he said.

Sohail’s mother Ishrat Jahan had been witness to his curiosities. “His mind was full of questions and he would always seek the answers from others. I used to ignore his curiosities, but never thought it would cost me his life,” she said.

Nimesh Desai, psychiatrist and director of the Institute of Human Behaviour & Allied Sciences, said Sohail might have been psychologically troubled or vulnerable to psychological problems.