CRPF takes up maiden mental health project to check suicides, depression

Concerned over suicides and stress factors claiming more lives of troops than operations, country's largest paramilitary force CRPF has launched a first-time project to ascertain the mental health of its jawans, the force chief has said.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is training a maiden batch of counsellors to check the menace in the ranks, its Director General R R Bhatnagar told PTI in an interview.

The over 3-lakh personnel strong paramilitary, involved in three major combat theatres of counter-terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, anti-Naxal operations in Left Wing Extremism hit states and counter-insurgency in the North East, has tied up with premier institutes like AIIMS and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) to ensure better work-life balance for the troops.

"If you were to look at suicide figures for the last five-six years, these numbers per lakh of force personnel have gone down. The number of suicides (in the force) to the national average for people of that age is comparable.

"Having said that, we are very concerned about the problem. We have started the administration of certain tests and questionnaires to find out the stress and depression levels of jawans as part of a pilot project," CRPF Director General (DG) R R Bhatnagar told PTI in an interview.

He said the test has been recently conducted in one of their field formation and force experts will now see the results to gauge its utility further and then implement it as a policy measure.

The CRPF chief was asked a question in the context of recent data that showed heart attacks, depression and suicides claimed 15 times more lives of troops than anti-Maoist operations during the last two years.

The data said 156 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel died due to heart attack, 38 because of depression and suicide and 435 due to other non-operational reasons last year.

Similarly, the data for 2016 revealed that 92 troops of the force died due to heart attack, 26 because of depression and suicides while 353 lost their lives due to other reasons.

The CRPF chief added that the latest questionnaire series has been prepared by a panel of experts and doctors in consultation with their in-house medical wing and they were now going through the results.

"We are checking the reliability and validation of this exercise. Then, we will make it a regular affair. We want to ensure that no life is lost due to these reasons," Bhatnagar said.

"We are taking steps, he said, to see how can we deal with it (depression) in terms of counselling and medical treatment?