Lancet warns India on suicides
Suicide is the second-most common cause of death among young people in India, The Lancet has revealed. According to the British medical journal, India has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
“Suicide kills nearly as many Indian men aged 15-29 as transportation accidents and nearly as many
young women as complications from pregnancy and childbirth,” said Vikram Patel, of London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the study’s lead author.
Transport accidents are the leading cause of deaths in men (about 14 per cent) in India while maternal disorders are the main cause of deaths among women (about 16 per cent), the study added.
According to the study, suicide is the second leading cause of death of young people in India — 13 per
cent in men and 14 per cent in women.
Experts say that with decline in maternal death rates, suicide could soon become the leading cause of
death among young women.
Noting further that public health interventions such as restrictions in access to pesticides might prevent many suicide deaths in India.
“In India, suicide is the cause of about twice as many deaths as is HIV/AIDS, and about the same number as maternal causes of death in young women,” The Lancet said.
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 are killing themselves in numbers that are almost the highest in the world,” added the author.
The research is based on the Registrar General of India’s first national survey of the causes of death,
conducted in 2001-03, and the researchers applied the age-specific and sex-specific proportion of suicide deaths in the 2001–03 survey to the 2010 UN estimates of absolute numbers of deaths (and age-specific risks) for all causes in India.
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