World Suicide Prevention Day is an awareness day observed on 10 September every year, in order to provide worldwide commitment and action to prevent suicides. The goal is to highlight the issues in hopes of reaching those who are struggling before it’s too late.

The ongoing pandemic has made many people more anxious, depressed and susceptible to take such extreme steps due to various reasons, such as job loss, losing a close one to coronavirus, lack of social gatherings and so on.

The best way to prevent suicide is to recognize the warning signs and know how to respond to this type of crisis.

“When people are in a stressful situation, they tend to forget that there are many other means and ways they can solve a particular problem and cope with their stress. One shouldn’t feel hopeless about his/her life and the situation the individual is going through. In most of the cases, our thought process only conspires to make situations seem impossible than they really are. In our challenging times, we start assuming that our current feelings and situation will never change for the better. One shouldn’t forget that suicide will affect your entire family as well as your close friends. All of the people, who are close to you, will be wounded by your extreme step. Even society needs to play an important role in erasing the stigma associated with mental health issues so that the needy person can take medical assistance,” said Dr Shuchin Bajaj, Founder & Director, Ujala Cygnus Group of Hospitals.

According to the clinical experience the depression, Suicidal ideation, self harm behaviour has surely been significantly high , people have been hopeless and impulsivity has been on all time high especially for adult population between 35-50 years, especially the males and the teenagers.

Reasons in the first wave and second wave could be different but mental health issues have been escalated like never before globally. Second wave has been a lethal combination of financial losses and losses of lives of loved ones making the suicidal ideation higher but not converted in the number of completed suicides.

In the second wave, however, due to the novelty of situation and uncertainty the first wave created a panic much more and had more number of completed suicides.

Very Important:

1. Please seek help when needed
2. Know how to talk to someone when they express suicidal thoughts and feelings of hopelessness
3. What not to do and say when someone expresses a suicidal thought
4. Please don’t tell them that this is just a phase
5. Don’t tell them that they have gone crazy
6. Don’t pretend that you did not hear anything and change the topic to distract them or because you didn’t know what to say
7. Don’t start to cry and tell them how they even can think something like this. Instead, tell them it must be a very difficult place to be when they are having thoughts like these
8. Ask them for how long they have been having these thoughts of feeling so hopeless
9. Ask them if they have ever experienced this before and acted out
10. Check if they are eating and sleeping well
11. Tell them that maybe you as a friend can be there to support, listen  and take them to an expert
12. Suggest them to try Lissun, a mental health app which will connect them to the experts like Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist