Seek help: No one else can play your part

Dr Minhaj Zafar Nasirabadi, Senior Consultant and Professor of Psychiatry.General.Secratary Hyderabad Psychiatric Society explains about the growing concerns of suicides in the youth.

The inability to cope, desires worses hardships and weak social structures are breaking our young and driving them to a point of hopelessness.

Junior doctors due to stress, exam topper due to failure in securing admission and adolescents due to blue whale challenge the numbers are merely increasing.

World Health Organization has warned that suicides will increase to 25 per cent by 2020. The present rate in India is 11.4 per cent.

Is the society ready to identify the causes and prevent these incidences? Are we prepared to save our young generation from taking this extreme step of ending their life?

While evaluating the risk factors apart from biological, psychological and personality disorders there is also an increasing environmental, social and financial factors which are increasing suicides.

Psychiatric disorders like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders are psychological issues which increase the risk of suicides in youths.

Personalities like narcisistic, boderline and anti-social are some of the factors that increase risk of suicide.

Neurobiological factors like serotonin function and gene X and environmental interactions increases the risk.

While these are known biological and psycholgoical causes, environmental stress factors like family adversity, financial losses, violence, abuse, suicidal behaviour of colleagues and peers increases the risk.

Social factors of present times are a major concern and have seen an increase in suicides in the present generation like:

  loss of job

  breakups in relationships

  inability to perform as per desire (or failure)

  inability to get admission in desired course/colleges

  financial breakdown

  losses due to social maladjustments

  losses due to natural disasters

These factors lead to feeling of hopelessness,helplessness and worthlessness. The occurence of these feelings results into suicidal ideation.

Suicidal thoughts lead to suicidal acts.

It is very improtant for family members to assess these risk factors and provide the required social support to deal with suicidal tendencies.

When brought to the medical set-up during the stage of active suicidal tendency he/she has to be admitted to prevent from implementing the idea.

Psycho-therapeutic interventions like creating a trusting and empathetic atmosphere for truthful communication,developing effective coping strategies has to be created.

Delineation of the motivation for suicidal act is important feature of treatment.

Cognative-behavior therapy,family and supportive therapy,psycopharmacological treatment and other biological treatments are also used in treatment.

Strategies for prevention is multidimensional as are the causes.

Making people aware that help is available is a big step.

Training health workers,teachers,school councilors,leaders and elders to identify signs of suicidality can help in long run to decrease rate of suicide in youth.Some changes in government policy can also reduce suicidal rate in general like that done by our neighbour Sri lanka where sucides have reduced to half from 1996 to 2005.

Working at various levels with the right intervention programs can decrease suicidal tendencies in youth.

  Timely vaccines are crucial too.

  Allowing the child to play games with other children is as important as feeding the child.

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