PESHAWAR, March 10: Many people, including teenagers, are brought to the city’s hospitals after taking excessive dosage of sedative drugs in an attempt to end their lives, doctors and medical workers told Dawn on Sunday.

“We receive at least five unconscious people per day who take excessive dosages of sedative drugs in their bid to commit suicide but their lives are saved due to timely medical aid,” said Dr Mohammad Khalid Anwar, casualty medical officer, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar.

Most of such people, including young men and women, resorted to taking sedatives to press their parents to accept their demands.

A dispenser at the Lady Reading Hospital said that nearly all of such patients survived, for they were brought to the hospital in time.

He said the patients took undissolved particles of the drugs through tubes, and added that there were also reports of deaths in the rural areas, where due to lack of health care facilities, it was difficult to suck the poisonous stuff.

According to Dr Khalid, these people take different sedatives, including diazepam and valium, and tranquillisers, like lexotanil and tofranil, but they survive at the end of the day as soon as the drug completely dissolves in the stomach and passes out through urine.

The patients are administered drips as soon as they are brought to the hospital to get the drugs excreted from the stomach.

Another doctor said most of the drug takers were teenagers, including girls, who either wanted to marry of their own choice or wanted to put up resistance to their parents’ unilateral decisions to marry them off.

According to psychologists, many young people take the drugs to escape from difficult circumstances they are caught in. “Frustration is the basic cause of such incidents. Young people of marriageable age use these tactics to get a decision in their favour,” said a psychiatrist at a city hospital.

He said most of the people taking drugs knew well that such acts would not kill them but only make them asleep. However, some unfortunate people took rat-killing powder and anti-lice or anti-bugs tablets, which contained highly poisonous compound cyanide, killing the takers within moments.

The psychologists are of the opinion that such extreme steps are the result of disintegrated personality, which lacks clarity, confidence, will and patience to deal with the affairs happening in the lives of these people.

They observe that such people do not pay adequate and timely attention to social responsibilities and divine orders and try to seek an escape route from their problems by taking sedatives.

Police suggest the users of the seductive drugs be punished according to the law.

Doctors argue that such people be tried in courts so that these crimes are discouraged because these people consume precious time of health workers and make “genuine” patients suffer. “Some 10 years ago, we used to register FIRs against those trying to commit suicides by taking drugs but later on we stopped that practice because of our preoccupation with other serious patients.”