NATIONAL POLICY AND ACTION PLAN ON PREVENTION OF SUICIDE
Report of the Presidential Committee on Prevention of Suicide 3rd December 1997
1. Those who commit suicide are from very diverse groups and measures appropriate to preventing suicide in one group may at times even serve as an encouragement to another group.
2. Measures of proven effectiveness (in producing sustained reductions in suicide rates) are few. These proven measures have the drawback that they appear to trivialize the deeper social and emotional causes underlying suicide. These measures are therefore often dismissed as superficial or unlikely to produce long term benefit.
3. Responses to suicide and its prevention are highly emotive and often politicized. A more rational approach is likely to improve efforts at finding effective interventions.
4. Reducing the easy and quick access to highly lethal methods of harming oneself is a measure that is strongly recommended.
5. Obtaining the cooperation of, and providing training to, persons in the mass media to present suicides only in ways that serve to discourage the behavior, is recommended.
6. Measures to reduce the lethality of pesticides should be explored and implemented.
7. Improvement in the medical management of persons brought to hospitals following poisoning should be ensured especially in the peripheral centers where survival or recovery rates are now low.
8. Appropriate treatment should be ensured for those with psychiatric disorders, who have survived an attempt at suicide.
9. Legal barriers to the helpful management of those who are at risk of suicide, and those who have survives suicide attempts, should be removed.
10. Experimental interventions should be carried out in different localities to test out the effectiveness of the following measures:
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- Improving the mental health and well being of youth and the elderly.
- Providing help and support to individuals and families in great distress.
- Initiating activities with communities, to help them see how they too may avoid the inadvertent encouragement of suicides especially impulsive acts.
- Restricting sales of pesticides to licensed purchasers over 18 years and selling them in diluted form in other instances.
SYNTHESIZED ULTRA-BRIEF SUMMARY:
- The recommendations of the Presidential Task Force for the Prevention of Suicide (1996) can be summarized as follows:
Reduce easy access to lethal methods. - Set up education and awareness programmes to change the suicide culture and also to enable the community to understand that the method of coping with suicide varies according to individual circumstances and issues involved.
- Engage media support to actually discourage suicide and to help the community realize that suicide is not an option when faced with difficulties.
- Humanize the law and introduce compulsory medical and counseling support for attempted suicides.
- Improve medical management to reduce fatalities especially in those cases where it is purely a cry for help.
- Set up a research centre.
- Set up experimental interventions at the community level.
