THE news of SP Adeel Akbar’s death sent a shockwave through the country.

Here was a man who, by all external measures, was a pillar of success and strength—a high-achieving CSS ranker, a dedicated police officer in a demanding post. His death by suicide, reportedly linked to depression following professional setbacks, is a profound and public tragedy. But this is not just one man’s story. It is a mirror reflecting a silent epidemic. When a public servant, someone we look to for protection, succumbs to such internal despair, it forces us to confront a terrifying reality: the human mind is fragile and no amount of external success can shield it from breaking. It exposes the fallacy that “strength” means suffering in silence. In a society that lionizes invincibility, especially in our uniformed personnel, where is the space to admit, “I am not okay”?

This is the very question that has driven my work for years. This tragedy is not an isolated incident; it is a symptom of a much larger, often invisible, crisis. Statistics on suicide in Pakistan are notoriously unreliable, not because the problem is small, but because it is so........

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