Draft on suicide prevention strategy

Madhya Pradesh is going to be the first State in the country to draft a suicide prevention strategy and the government has formed a task force it.

• The task force comprises of a range subject experts such as psychiatrists, legal experts, researchers, academics and social workers.
• Six sub-committees have been formed to analyse the causative and preventive strategies and the task force has been mandated to submit a report in two months.
• Each sub-committee has been given a specific mandate – such as understanding the sociological factors, suggesting preventive methods, devising ways to raise mass awareness and suggesting newer methods for the training of professionals and individuals.
• They will also look at how the laws can be strengthened or diluted to improve the situation and understand the inter-sectoral linkages in suicide prevention.

Suicide:

• Suicide is the practise of taking one's own life or deliberate termination of one's own physical existence.
• Reasons Behind Suicide: There can be many reasons for an individual taking his own life.
• Stress because of competition and academic failures as was seen in Kota, relationship failure, work pressure and economic reasons. These are among the main reasons in the 14-30 year age group.
• Religious practices like 'sallekhana' or 'santhra' in Jain religion in which Jain ascetics observe starvation to death.
• Political reasons like self-immolation in case of agitation and some individuals laying down their lives for the freedom of their country to set an example for others.
• Poverty, debt and resulting shame lead many towards the path of suicide.
• In present times stress resulting from economic, social and peer pressure is considered to be the leading cause.

Suicide in India:

• According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2020, a total of 1,53,052 suicides were reported in the country
• Madhya Pradesh has third highest reported suicide cases (14,578) in the country.
• At 9.5%, Madhya Pradesh was the third among the States with the highest percentage of suicides in the country, up from the third place it held in 2018 (8.8%) and 2019 (9.0%).
• At 17.4%, the suicide rate (instances per one lakh population) was above the national average of 11.3.