India Gets Its First Suicide Prevention Policy

India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare recently announced the country’s first National Suicide Prevention Strategy aimed at reducing suicide mortality by 10 per cent by the year 2030. The strategy is set to use time-bound action plans and multi-sectoral collaborations to achieve its goal effectively.

The strategy includes establishing surveillance mechanisms for suicide in the next three years, along with psychiatric outpatient departments and suicide prevention services through a District Mental Health Programme in the next five years as well as the integration of a mental wellbeing curriculum in education institutions within eight years. In line with the WHO’s South East-Asia Region Strategy for suicide prevention, the national policy not only aims to create awareness and relief measures but also includes guidelines to ensure responsible media reporting of suicides as well as restricting access to means of suicide. This comes after the previous year, 2021, recorded a high number of 1,64,033 cases of suicide in India, coming up to 450 per day.

‘Further efforts are now required to prevent suicides as a public health priority. Suicides impact all sections of the society and thus require concerted and collaborative efforts from individuals and the community at large,’ said Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya.

The first draft of the strategy was credited to psychiatrist Lakshmi Vijayakumar who has also founded the Sneha India Foundation, which also works at suicide prevention. In a statement, Vijayakumar said, ‘The most important thing is that the government has acknowledged that suicide is a problem... We now have a plan, a rather well-conceived plan involving multi-sectoral collaborations, because the only way a strategy would work would be to involve various sectors.’

Seeking help? Here are some helplines that can be useful:

Sneha India Foundation

Call: 044 2464 0050 (Available 8 am to 10 pm everyday)

iCall

Call: 9152987821 (Available Monday to Saturday, 8 am to 10 pm)

Image used for representational purposes only.