Towards compassionate suicide care in India

This article is authored by Dr Nandini Murali, founder, SPEAK.

When I lost my husband to suicide in 2017, my world collapsed. Until then, suicide had been a distant word—a newspaper headline, a statistic. Suddenly, it entered the intimate geography of my life. In the aftermath, I discovered that suicide responses in India were narrowly focused on prevention and intervention, while postvention—structured support for people bereaved by suicide—was almost invisible, even within mental health systems.

Suicide Prevention

Through my advocacy and memoir on suicide loss, I sought to challenge this silence. My journey reflects the broader theme of this year’s World Suicide Prevention Day: Changing the Narrative. Changing the narrative calls for compassionate suicide care across the spectrum—prevention, intervention, and postvention. It requires us to recognize that suicide is not only about statistics or clinical conditions, but also about people, relationships, and stories.

Consider Kairavi Bharat Ram’s story, who cried herself to sleep through high school nights while battling suicidal thoughts. In her home, depression was incomprehensible: How could a teenager possibly be depressed?

Or Zainab Patel gut wrenching narrative, having attempted suicide nine times by the age of 14 while struggling in a faith context that condemned suicide as a sin.

These stories represent lived experiences in urban India, often within families of privilege. Even with access to care, stigma and silence meant that help was not always within reach. Their narratives remind us that suicide does not discriminate—it cuts across class, caste, gender, and geography.

Suicide is a global public health crisis, but in India the numbers are staggering. It is the leading cause of death among people aged 15–29. According to NCRB data, between 1.35 to 2.58 lakh Indians die by suicide annually—figures that do not capture the hidden pool of attempts.

India contributes disproportionately to the global toll: 36.6% of all female suicides and 24.3% of male suicides in 2016 occurred here. Despite the decriminalisation of suicide under the Mental Healthcare Act in 2017, India continues to shoulder ⅓ of the global burden of suicide, depression and addiction.

The reasons are deeply intertwined with social realities: agrarian distress, unemployment, indebtedness, intimate partner violence, educational pressures, and untreated mental illness. Behind each statistic lies a story of pain and resilience.

One of the most alarming trends is the rising suicide rates among children and students. The burden of exams, academic expectations, and job insecurity creates crushing psychological weight. But what happens when a young person in a classroom requires medication or compassionate listening? Too often, they are dismissed or told to “snap out of it.” Changing the narrative means reshaping classrooms and campuses into spaces of empathy and support.

Changing the Narrative becomes real only when people with lived experience—those who have attempted suicide, caregivers, and the bereaved—are recognised as essential stakeholders.

For instance, Sidrah Naiyer recalls her early college years, away from home and battling depression. A mental health professional dismissed her distress, and she attempted to overdose of pills. Coming from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, Sidrah points to low literacy, lack of awareness, and stigma as barriers. Yet her candour helped her family begin to understand mental health. Her story reminds us that beyond medical treatment, what people need most is care, compassion, and connection.

Suicide is complex and multidimensional. Mental health conditions are only one of many risk factors. Prevention must balance reducing risks with strengthening protective factors: Education, livelihood, social support and connectedness.

Neha Kirpal, a social entrepreneur, lost her brother to suicide five years ago as a result of adverse childhood traumas, given her mother’s lifelong journey with schizophrenia. Reflecting on decades of caregiving, she highlights the lack of structures to support families dealing with chronic mental illness from the 1980s till date. Her story points to the urgent need for long-term community-based systems of care including interventions in school and college settings.

Changing the narrative on suicide in India requires courage to confront silence, honesty to acknowledge pain, and compassion to build community responses.

• Mental health professionals and health care organisations ought to draw from the lived experience expertise of people’s experiences; and combine it with clinical expertise so as to design care that is truly responsive and collaborative with those suffering and their caregivers
• Policymakers must integrate suicide prevention into public health, rooted in local realities
• Schools and colleges must shift from punitive or dismissive approaches to supportive interventions taking a “whole institution” approach so as to involve all stakeholders
• Families and communities must listen without judgment, breaking intergenerational stigma and seeking help as early as possible when we see the early warning signs
• Media must report responsibly, amplifying stories of recovery and hope

Above all, suicide care must be done with those most affected, not just for them.

Suicide is not inevitable. It is preventable when society builds ecosystems of care and solidarity, acting fast and early. As we mark World Suicide Prevention Day, we must commit to moving from silence to empathy, from shame to dignity, from isolation to connectedness.

By listening to those who have attempted suicide, by supporting those bereaved by it, and by addressing the systemic pressures that create despair leading to suicidality; India can begin to rewrite story of loss and provide more stability and resilience to its people across communities and institutions. Going beyond statistics, this movement will be one of collective healing, resilience, and responsibility as a people.

This article is authored by Dr Nandini Murali, founder, SPEAK.