Warangal sees suicide surge

Warangal: Suicides have emerged as the biggest killer in 2012 and 2013 in Warangal with recorded deaths of 1,802 people, according to the crime statistics released by the police department.

It is followed by accidental deaths with 1,232 recorded deaths in the last two years.

Of the two years, urban jurisdiction recorded 727 suicide deaths while the rural jurisdiction reported 1,232 deaths, clearly indicating that the failure of the mental health programme in Warangal by the district administration.

While awareness programmes on road safety and safe driving are routinely taken up by the departments concerned, mental health experts rued that such programmes are non-existent for those with suicidal tendencies.

“There is a single psychiatrist at help for those in need in the entire government health sector in Warangal but even he works without proper infrastructure at MGM hospital,” said noted psychiatrist Dr Y. Sreedhar Raju, president of Warngal chapter of Indian Psychiatric Society, which hosted the national mental health programme in the city two months ago.

He solely singled out non-functional district level mental health programme (DLMHP) for the high number of suicide cases.

The DLMHP envisages setting up of a mobile unit comprising one psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist nurse and a pharmacist,  Interestingly, experts including Dr Y Sreedhar Raju and Dr G Sampath Reddy, faculty in the department of psychology, Kakatiya University, cited causes that were common for suicidal tendencies in rural and urban areas in addition to differing causes unique to each.

The common causes for suicidal tendencies in urban and rural suicidal tendencies in the two years were said to be socio-political crisis (read statehood agitation), lack of interpersonal skills besides absence of psychiatric awareness among the people and non-availability of psychiatric inpatient facilities.

Whereas some of the causes unique to urban suicidal tendencies include stress, depression, over-expectation, parental pressure etc while other causes like disparities in income, indebtedness, unemployment, domestic problems, high income expectation etc are said to be linked to rural suicidal tendencies.