LAUSR

We recently published the short article ‘Young teenage suicides in Bangladesh – are mandatory Junior School Certificate exams to blame?’ (Mamun and Griffiths 2020a). In response to this, Arafat (2020) made three critical claims. In our view, each of these claims is unfounded and/or simply incorrect. Arafat’s first claim: “Bangladesh has no national suicide database...Therefore, there is no data to support the statement that after starting the mandatory junior school certificate exam, the suicide rate has been increased” (p.1). Our response: We are only too aware that Bangladesh has no official suicide surveillance or database system and have highlighted this very fact in a number of our previous articles (e.g., Mamun and Griffiths 2020a, b, c; Mamun et al. 2020a). We never once claimed on our article that the Bangladeshi suicide rate had increased as a consequence of the introduction of the junior school certificate (JSC) exam. Arafat has highlighted something that was never there to start with. We simply reported that there had been (at least) 39 teenage suicides reported in Bangladesh media stories during a 3-year period (2017–2019). We also speculated that the number of suicides among this group may be higher than other educational cohorts and provided the example of a Bangladeshi medical sciences student cohort. More specifically, we stated: