Suicide in India

‘Suicide is taking the lives of people who could have been saved’ – suicide prevention expert at a recently held workshop on suicide prevention.

According to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the suicide rate in India rose from ‘9.9 per lakh population in 2017 to 12.4 per lakh population in 2022’.

It is to be noted is that not all suicides are planned; many have been spur-of-the-moment decisions. Reasons for a person taking this drastic step could be one or more of the following (indicative list):

• fear of being caught/ found out
• failure in a relationship
• fear of failure
• Failing in an examination
• being caught in a situation of conflict
• family pressure
• Peer pressure
• shame
• guilt
• a sense of hopelessness
• Seeking a way out from the pain (mental and/or physical)
• Harassment
• Alcohol and substance abuse

Many people have taken this drastic step because they must have felt that their problem could not be resolved and/or there was no one who could help.

Various suicide prevention and gatekeeper programmes are held across the country at different points of time. And there are helplines in case of distress too.

AASRA runs one such helpline – 91-9820466726. They also have a list of numbers from different states here (http://aasra.info/helpline.html).

Do keep in mind: suicide is preventable.

A parting thought: statistics show that more men have died by suicide as compared to women in India these past couple of decades.

PS: More info can be found here: https://cmhlp.org/imho/blog/takeaways-from-the-ncrb-data-on-suicide-for-2022/

#maanasa #projectmaanasa  #mentalhealth #suicide #suicideprevention

PPS: This article was first published on LinkedIn here (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deepa-vaishnavi_maanasa-projectmaanasa-mentalhealth-activity-7206600967524352001-x8o8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)

The image is a line graph titled “Number of suicides in India from 1971 to 2022, by gender (in 1,000s).” It shows the number of suicides among males, females, and transgender individuals over the years.

Y-axis: Represents the number of deaths in thousands.
X-axis: Represents the years from 1971 to 2022.

Three lines represent different genders:

Blue line (Male): Starts at 26.33 thousand in 1971, rising steadily to a peak of 87.84 thousand in 2011, then increasing significantly to 118.98 thousand in 2022.

Black line (Female): Begins at 17.35 thousand in 1971, rising to around 47-48 thousand by 2011, and remains relatively stable before slightly increasing to 48.17 thousand in 2022.

Green line (Transgender): Data starts from 2014 with 0.02 thousand and remains constant at 0.02 thousand up to 2022.

The source of the data is mentioned as “https://www.statista.com/statistics/665336/india-suicides-by-gender/“.