Is India's highest suicide rate due to better reporting or rising distress?

Is India’s highest suicide rate because of better reporting or rising distress? The country reported the highest suicide rate in its history in 2021, with 12 suicides for every 100,000 people.

Experts say this might be a reflection of better reporting of deaths by suicide rather than an actual increase in numbers. Notwithstanding an increase in reporting, experts say the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) might be undercounting suicides by women.

Three trends that data from the Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, 2021, show:

• The suicide rate is the highest since India began publishing this data in 1967, with 12 suicides per 100,000 people 
• The rate of deaths by suicide were highest in developed states like Kerala and Telangana, at 27 suicides per 100,000 population
• 72.5 per cent of those who committed suicide were men

A death by suicide is defined as the deliberate termination of life. For a death to be a suicide, it should be an unnatural death, the desire to die should originate within the person, and there should be a reason for ending his/her life, according to NCRB.

Lakshmi Vijayakumar, a consultant psychiatrist and founder of SNEHA, a non-governmental organisation in Chennai for the prevention of suicides, points to three reasons for underreporting of suicides: lack of medical certification of deaths, stigma associated with mental health, and criminalisation — not just in terms of reporting of suicides but also sometimes in the denial of insurance if the death is by suicide.

India decriminalised attempt to suicide in 2017 under the Mental Health Care Act, which protects the rights of a person with mental illness, and provides for access to treatment.  In line with this decriminalisation, experts suggest that the data on suicide not be under the police but under the health care system.

 

Source: IndiaSpend