In India we tend to have a fatalistic attitude towards suicide, tending to believe that nothing can be done to prevent it, focusing only on the politically volatile issue of farmer suicides, or periodically, when there is a death by suicide of a prominent personality or suicides in vulnerable groups (for example, students especially after board exam results), there is a hue and cry in the popular press with opinion makers demanding immediate action.
The resulting knee-jerk reaction from policy makers is to offer some immediate solutions (appointing counsellors in colleges, etc.) which have little evidence of success. After a while, everyone forgets the issue, until the next such event and the cycle repeats itself.
Why should you care? Because a disproportionate number of young Indians die by suicide and these are preventable deaths.
This book aims to present evidence-based strategies to tackle suicide, using interviews, case studies, and conversations that lay readers can make sense of, while proposing an outline of steps that policy makers, journalists and key stakeholder groups can collaborate on to provide better solutions and save precious lives in India.
Review
"A timely book that can help us have potentially life-saving conversations." DEEPIKA PADUKONE
“A shocking fact and huge wake-up call is that suicide is the leading cause of death for young Indians. As a country — across all our expertise and fields of interest — we need to pay closer attention, and this book urges us to do just that, with clear policy level suggestions and a call to action.” ABHINAV BINDRA
About the Author
Abhijit Nadkarni is a psychiatrist and global mental health researcher whose work is focused on developing and testing innovative solutions to increase access to mental healthcare in low resource settings. He is an Associate Professor of Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and co-Director of the Addictions Research Group at Sangath a leading mental health research NGO in India.
Amrita Tripathi is a writer and former news anchor. She is the author of five books, including the novels Broken News and The Sibius Knot, which explore various facets of modern life and the fragility of relationships. Tripathi has edited and co-authored the Mindscape trilogy, titled Real Stories of Dealing with Depression, Young Mental Health and Age of Anxiety, published by Simon & Schuster India. Tripathi is also the founder-editor of The Health Collective, a site dedicated to raising awareness on mental health and illness in India, and presently works in the field of social media. She can be reached @amritat or @healthcollectif on Twitter.
Soumitra Pathare trained as a psychiatrist at Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital Mumbai and St Thomas’ Hospital, London. He has a doctoral degree from VU University, Amsterdam, and is a Member of The Royal College of Psychiatrists, United Kingdom. He is currently the Director of Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy at the Indian Law Society in Pune, India. Atmiyata, a rural community volunteer-led mental health service he pioneered in Mehsana, Gujarat was recently listed by World Health Organization as one of the 25 good practices for community outreach mental health services in the world.
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