SUICIDE RATES IN INDIA

                                                        SUCIDE RATES IN INDIA

Hello this is tanmayee nayak i am here with somes thoughts which i like express it with my blog . so i chooesd the topic  "SUCIDE RATES IN INDIA".

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”

In most countries suicide mortality increases with age. In India, the opposite happens. The suicide rate among young adults aged 15-29 is more than three times the national average. This makes us a country with one of the highest suicide rates among youth in the world.

What explains this oddity? The answer lies in yet another oddity: India has a relatively high suicide rate among young adult women.

Globally, suicide is much commoner among men than women. The battle to reduce suicide has also been more successful for women than men. Across nations, suicide rates for men are three to seven times as high as for women. The same pattern prevails in India across most age groups, though here the gender gap is less sharp.

The oddity is among young adults for whom the gender gap virtually vanishes, and in certain locations, suicide is higher among women. One study published in the Lancet a few years ago found that suicide rate of girls aged 15-19 around Vellore, Tamil Nadu, was 148 per lakh, almost thrice the rate for similarly aged boys.'

The gender gap in suicide gets worse after marriage. Here is another oddity. In most Western countries, married women are less likely to commit suicide than formerly married women. India is an outlier: married women are more likely to commit suicide than divorced, widowed and separated women, according to the Million Death study, a research project based on a nationally representative mortality survey on the causes of death occurring in 1.1 million homes in 6,671 areas chosen randomly across the country.

Science does not tell us much about the exact cause of suicide. Broadly, we know that biological, environmental and cultural factors make certain populations more vulnerable than others. High suicide rates for young married women in India could flow from a combination of these factors.

It is tempting to interpret this high rate as the result of psychological and physical torture from husbands and in-laws, that is common in India. Curiously, a geographic element weakens the gender explanation of high suicide rates among young married women. South Indian states, well-known for better gender relations and female empowerment than north Indian states, have much higher youth mortality. Neighbouring Sri Lanka, with excellent social indicators and higher women’s empowerment, also has a high youth female suicide rate. This could simply reflect greater sociocultural tolerance of suicide as a way out of mental stress.

In India, we have a tendency to link suicides with income or economic distress. Farmers have captured all the recent attention on suicides. Suicide among farmers is considered evidence of exceptionally high economic distress among them. Public discourse is politically motivated, highly charged, generally irreverent of facts, and substantially non-serious. In fact the suicide rate is lower for farmers than non-farmers.

Most extant research does not associate poverty with suicide mortality. Indeed, suicide mortality in India is higher among the more educated, who are typically better off than the less educated. Cross-country comparisons also reject a link between poverty and suicide. Among well-off OECD countries, Japan has the highest suicide rate at 20 per lakh population, followed by Switzerland at 14 per lakh. Much-poorer India’s suicide rate is 11 per lakh population.

Data across Indian states lead to the same conclusion. Suicide rates are up to 10 times higher in richer southern states than in poorer northern states. Now, economic or other shocks can push the vulnerable over the edge. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, sharply increased the suicide rate there. What matters is a relative worsening of economic conditions, not the absolute level of incomes.

While the exact causes of suicide remain obscure, the good news is that, globally, the battle against suicides has been a successful one. Since 1994, suicide rates have fallen by more than a third globally. The sharpest decline has been in Russia, South Korea and Japan – the three countries that also have among the highest rates in the world.

As in many dimensions of well-being, China has been a leader in the battle against suicide. Its rate has fallen to 7 per lakh in recent years. Like India, China used to have high suicide rates for young women, but that rate has fallen by 90% since the mid-1990s. A contributing factor is urbanisation that granted women greater freedom of work; opportunities to leave violent husbands and in-laws; and live relatively stress-free lives in cities.

Means restriction is one of the most effective strategies. In Britain, simply repackaging of painkillers from bottles to blister packs reduced suicide death from overdose of paracetamol by 44%. Limiting access to guns in Australia and restricting alcohol distribution in Russia lowered suicides. In India, toxic pesticides are often used to end life. Better packaging and restricted access of pesticides could reduce the risk of suicide in rural areas.

Globally, a major factor contributing towards reduced suicide is better diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. Anti-depressants, psychiatric help, access to suicide lifelines, and just the availability of somebody to talk to sympathetically can curb suicides. It would have to be a societal effort and not just something left to the government. This requires compassion and caring towards a targeted vulnerable population, and cannot be simply addressed with buckets of money. Farm loan waiver, every politician’s favourite policy choice to tackle suicide, is extremely blunt, leaky and wasteful. Imagine the chance that a state or nation-wide loan waiver will reach the 0.008% of farmers who are at risk of committing suicide?

What drives a person to suicide?

There are many causes for suicidal ideation. Mental illnesses like depression and anxiety disorders are considered one of the leading causes of suicide world over. Apart from mental illnesses, family problems, love affairs and marital issues have emerged as a leading cause of suicides in India. Drug-abuse and alcohol addiction were also causes for suicides in males, according to NCB DATA.

While family problems, marriage-related issues and illnesses (prolonged physical and mental illnesses) were the leading causes of death by suicide among the age group of 18 to 30 years, in addition to these three causes, bankruptcy or indebtness was another prominent cause of death by suicide among those between the ages of 30 and 45 years. Failure in exams, love affairs and family problems were leading causes of death by suicide among those below 18 years, according to NCRB data. A significant percentage of suicides in India are farmer suicides, usually due to financial burdens.

Urgent need for intervention

The fact that a majority of suicides in India are by persons below the age of 45 years imposes a huge social, emotional and economic burden on our society. And while many people still believe suicide is not preventable, sociologists and psychologists have over time concurred that a large number of deaths by suicide can be prevented with timely intervention. According to the WHO, death by suicide is preventable with timely, evidence-based and often low-cost interventions.

India’s public health policy on suicide, was altered just a few years back, decriminalizing suicide, thus taking a much-needed step in the right direction. The Mental Healthcare Act 2017 decriminalised suicide, ensuring dignity and adequate medical relief to those attempting it. The National Mental Health Programme and Health and Wellness Centres under the Ayushman Bharat Program are efforts to provide quality care at the primary health care level. In addition, there are many helplines available, run by the government and NGOs. But sadly, most of them do not run 24/7. With a large number of death by suicides occurring during the night, this poses a huge challenge to suicide prevention. While this situation is slowly changing with 24/7 helplines coming up specifically to help students and farmers, a lot more needs to be done in this direction.

Another urgent need in India is the education of therapists in suicide prevention as many therapists and psychologists are not trained in it. “The formal university education offered currently to the students of Psychology dont offer much training in the area of suicide prevention and even lesser in the area of suicide intervention. The onus is on the MHPs to acquire these skills separately after they complete their degrees. If more MHPs acquire these skills and find themselves confident to handle clients with suicidality then there will be a big impact to this suicide crisis in India” Dr. Amitabh Ghosh, Trauma Psychiatrist. 

With greater awareness among the general public and therapists, in addition to timely intervention, suicide prevention can be far more effective in India than it currently is

.