| Suicide rate among youngsters higher than in West |
PARIS Young people in India, the engine of its rapidly expanding economy, are committing suicide at a much higher rate than in the West, researchers said on Friday, calling for urgent intervention.
Suicide is the second-most common cause of death among young people in India, they wrote in Lancet, a medical journal, and was set to overtake complications from pregnancy and childbirth as the lead cause among women aged 15 to 29.
For men in the same age group, suicide claimed just slightly fewer lives than transport accidents in 2010.
Urging further research into the causes behind the trend, the report said the suicide rate was highest among well-educated young people from India’s richer, southern states.
“Young educated Indians from the richer states of India are killing themselves in numbers that are almost the highest in the world,” the report’s lead author Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said.
In the western world, suicide is more common among older, poorer and lesser educated people. While the study did not identify the causes, Patel said: “There can’t be any other explanation - it has to do something with social change, the rapidity of social change and its potential impact on educated young people.”
Some 900,000 people around the world kill themselves every year, according to the World Health Organisation, about 13 out of every 100,000.
Of the global total, nearly 190,000 suicides were believed to have occurred in India in 2010, second only to China with an estimated 200,000 cases per year.
Patel said the rate of suicide among women in India was three times higher than in high-income countries, but tapered off among women who were either divorced, widowed or separated from their husbands.
“This is consistent with other research from India that marriage is also a risk factor for depression, which is of course the commonest mental illness associated with suicide,” he said.
“One can speculate, but obviously the most plausible explanation is that for many women marriage is not out of choice and they find themselves trapped in very difficult and stressful social circumstance and of course there is the huge issue of domestic violence.” “Public health interventions such as restrictions in access to pesticides might prevent many suicide deaths in India,” said the report, adding that most Indians did not have access to suicide prevention programmes or mental health care.
While the study did not identify the causes, Patel said: “There can’t be any other explanation, it has to do something with social change, the rapidity of social change and its potential impact on educated young people.”
Globally, suicide is the most common cause of death in female adolescents and the third in young men after road traffic accidents and violence, said the Lancet, in a special series on the topic.
Agence France-Presse
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