Debt really is one of the scourges of our age. It's well known that debt problems can affect one's physical and mental well-being and feelings of self worth. Every day we are all assaulted by banks and credit card companies promising us an easy way out of our financial problems. Massive loans are offered and agreed over the phone. Whether or how people are supposed to pay the money back is rarely discussed. Companies talk in terms of 'easy repayments' as if the business of clearing debt was the simplest thing in the world, when in fact it is one of the hardest. Unless your income is going up on a monthly basis by leaps and bounds, you will never be able to repay the loans.

The mental pain caused by debt is very strong compared to other stress and is more likely to be the reason for suicide. This is mainly because a person in debt often feels trapped and sees no other way out.

A tragic story hit the headlines of a man, who in his desperation at his level of debt, had committed suicide. He had started with relatively small loans but had gradually run up thousands of pounds of debt by borrowing to repay his borrowing. The banks were quite rightly criticised for 'making it so easy' but more importantly, his wife, who was understandably grief-stricken at his death, also felt cheated, angry and horrified that her husband had been both silly enough to let things get out of hand in this way , and felt unable to discuss it with her.

Newspapers regularly report the suicides of desperate people who can no longer cope with credit card debt, repossession - and, in one case, a student who was overwhelmed by his overdraft problem.

I was reading some debt related articles on the internet and stumbled on some debt problems faced by people far away from here. It's not just the affluent societies that are plagued by debt , every layer of the economic strata is affected by it. However, the reaction to debt, of people from different economic levels and social backgrounds is vastly different. While debt means minor discomfort to some, it means death to others. In both Japan and India suicide is much more clearly linked to personal debt problems than is in the western societies such as those in the UK and USA .

Between 1997 and the end of 2000, in just the district of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, 1,826 people, mainly farmers unable to repay their loans, committed suicide, when they felt they could no longer feed their families honorably. Rising input costs, falling grain and oilseed prices, closures by banks -- all policy-driven measures -- crushed them.

In Japan many small earners unable to raise money through banks revert to high interest money lenders linked to the Yakuza.

Yakuza are members of traditional organized crime groups in Japan. These groups are run by criminals, most commonly for the purpose of generating a monetary profit. They are also known as the "violence group". Today the Yakuza are one of the largest crime organizations in the world . Nationwide there were some 84,700 known members of Yakuza. In Western press, Yakuza groups are often referred to as the "Japanese mafia".

When they find themselves unable to keep up with repayments the money lenders bring shame on them by letting their neighbors know of their inability to uphold their commitments. No longer able to face their neighborhood these shamed indebted families can only find a solution through committing suicide, an acceptable means of solving certain problems in Japanese culture. The idea is that this shame could be erased by death, hopefully sparing other family members from disgrace.