Pull back from the edge
- The tragic death of a 21-year-old IIT Guwahati student, shortly after another student’s suicide at the institute, underscores an urgent public health crisis.
Suicide: A looming public health crisis
- According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 1.71 lakh people died by suicide in India in 2022.
- This translates to a rate of 12.4 per 1,00,000 individuals, the highest ever recorded in the country.
- Globally, 7,26,000 people died by suicide, indicating the gravity of the issue worldwide.
Conventional Suicide Prevention Models
- Historically, suicide prevention has focused on individual risk factors such as
- Family history
- Mental illness
- Substance abuse (drugs and alcohol)
- While individual-focused strategies are important, they overlook the broader social and economic factors contributing to suicide rates.
India’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2022)
- This strategy outlines three primary objectives
- Establishing suicide surveillance mechanisms.
- Creating psychiatric outpatient departments for suicide prevention services.
- Integrating mental well-being education into institutions.
- It fails to account for the role played by social determinants in exacerbating tendencies for self-harm. These include
- Macroeconomic policies
- Healthcare access
- Social and cultural values
- Commercial factors (alcohol and firearm industries)
The Need for Broader Policy Interventions
- Suicide prevention should be considered on a larger scale, relying not just on targeted interventions
- Broader social policies, such as poverty reduction and housing support, may be crucial in addressing the underlying causes of suicide.
- In the US, a study showed that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage between 2006 and 2016 reduced annual suicide deaths by 8,000.
Call for Comprehensive Solutions
- The magnitude of the problem demands innovative and inclusive government policies to address the diverse factors leading to suicide.
- A holistic approach is necessary to ensure that vulnerable populations are not left behind in suicide prevention efforts.