Persons aged between 19 and 40 years are vulnerable to suicide, Professor H Chandrashekar, Head of Department, Psychiatry Department, Victoria Hospital, said on Monday.
He was speaking at the inaugural programme of an inter-collegiate skit competition organised by the Medico Pastoral Association’s Centre for Mental Health Care and Vishwas Counselling Centre of Jain University Students Guidance and Counselling Centre in the city to mark the World Suicide Prevention Day on Monday.
“The initial stage is most important for an emotionally distressed person.
Such persons must seek support at this stage,” Prof Chandrashekar said adding that it is important for the society to be aware of the ways in which a crisis like this could be overcome.
G Gururaj, professor and head of the Department of Epidemiology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), discussed a study undertaken in 2007 in which families of 400 suicide cases and 370 attempted suicide cases were taken through a kind of ‘psychological autopsy’.
“We found that there was no single trigger which caused a person to commit suicide, but instead it was a complicated interplay of many different reasons which lead up to the suicide,” Gururaj said.
He asked the people gathered to learn to communicate distress to others and share problems in order to learn more from other people’s experiences as well.
Thilaka Bhaskaran, a volunteer at Sahai, a suicide prevention helpline in the city, spoke about her experiences. “We really need more volunteers in order to be able to deal with calls at evening and night. We are currently functioning between 10 am and 5 pm because of lack of volunteers,” she remarked.