Monday, June 30, 2014

Write-up on Aasra in the BBC

Published December 7, 2012 | By admin

4 December 2012Last updated at 14:50 GMT

Shantanu Negi’s Facebook suicide prompts shock in India

By Shalini Joshi Dehradun

64542907 64542444 Write up on Aasra in the BBC

Shantanu Negi’s friends initially believed his Facebook post to be a joke

An Indian student has killed himself after posting a Facebook suicide note.

“Bye everyone… I will miss you… I quit,” wrote Shantanu Negi, 16. Police think he was worried about an exam.
His friends initially believed it to be a joke, with many “liking” his last post and others commenting on it before they found out what happened.
Counsellors working with the social media site to improve reporting and support say many such cases in India are referred but few result in death.
Shantanu’s death occurred at home in the northern town of Dehradun on Monday evening.
Within hours, as the news of the suicide spread, his shocked friends started writing condolence messages.
“Shantanu killed himself because he was worried that he won’t do well in his mathematics examination,” police officer Dinesh Singh Bhandari told the BBC.
A student of class 11 in the prestigious Asian School, Shantanu was a good student who had scored 90% marks in his class 10 examinations.
“Recently, he seemed to have lost interest in studies. We had talked to him about it, but there was no pressure on him,” his father Pushkar Negi said.
From his Facebook profile, Shantanu appeared to be like any other happy and carefree teenager and his school said there had never been any complaints about him.
Helpline Last year, Facebook launched a system to allow users in India and elsewhere to report friends who they think may be contemplating suicide.
In India, the social networking site added the Mumbai-based Aasra suicide prevention helpline – part of the Befrienders Worldwide/Samaritans network – as part of its suicide risk alert system.
Johnson Thomas of Aasra told the BBC that in the past year they had intervened in more than 300 cases forwarded to them by Facebook.
Once a case has been flagged by worried friends, trained counsellors from the helpline email users offering to help them.
“We tell them we are worried and concerned about them. We cannot invade their privacy, but we request them to call us,” Mr Thomas said.
“Very often they do and we talk them out of it. Some just stop posting such messages because they realise they have friends who care for them.”
Mr Thomas says Shantanu “needed reassurance that not performing well in one exam is not a reason to kill himself. We all need people around us to support us.”

More on This Story

Article in The Star World(Toronto Star) with reference to AASRA

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2011/03/22/as_stressed_indian_students_hit_breaking_point_new_ad_urges_parents_to_chill.html

The Star WORLD

As stressed Indian students hit breaking point, new ad urges parents to chill

TV commercial sparks debate about one of India’s most pressing social issues: the off-the-chart stress India’s children face to excel in school.

RICK WESTHEAD / TORONTO STAR Order this photo

In India, competition for university spots is fierce and students are under so much stress that some schools have removed ceiling fans so students can't hang themselves. Shashwat Misra, 15, (foreground) and his brother Samarth, 18, study in their New Delhi home.

NEW DELHI—The boy lies flat on his back on a judo mat, wincing under his heavier opponent’s weight.

His mother watches from the stands nearby and even though the crowd roars, her son — he’s maybe 10 years old with a shock of sweat-soaked black hair — can hear her voice in his mind.

“Are you wondering what people will say? No one will say anything. And it’s not necessary to win each time.’’

The mother and son are actors who appear in a new TV commercial for a malt drink mix that’s airing across India. The 30-second ad has touched off a discussion about one of this country’s most pressing social issues: the off-the-chart stress India’s children face to excel in school.

“It’s such an important message to send that children are not worthless if they don’t finish first,” says Johnson Thomas, who runs a youth helpline in Mumbai.

“Most people in this country now are in pursuit of a better life and their children are the way for them to get there.”

Far too often, Johnson and education experts say, India’s school-aged children shuffle into exam halls understanding that the fortunes of their families rest on their shoulders. They are acutely aware that the odds are against them.

India has 1.2 billion people, a figure that’s expected to surge by 30 per cent over the next 40 years, and 60 per cent of the current population here is under the age of 30. With roughly 30 million students graduating high school each year, space in a university or college program is precious.

In New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University receives about 100,000 applications every year and accepts about 1,500.

Then there’s St. Stephen’s College, where just 450 of 12,000 applicants are accepted.

Rumour has it this year that nothing less than 98 per cent on the final high-school exam will be good enough for St. Stephen’s.

A recent survey showed India’s heralded middle class spends an estimated one-third of its income every month on tutors and other forms of private tuition.

Weekend newspapers are bursting with ads for tutoring centres such as the Cambridge School and the Harvard Centre.

For some students, the pressure becomes impossible.

When exam marks are disclosed each June, Indian newspapers publish a slew of student suicide stories.

In New Delhi last month, a 15-year-old named Aljin reportedly hanged himself from the ceiling fan in his bedroom because of school-related stress.

His death occurred at the same time the Indian magazine Outlook reported that several universities have replaced ceiling fans in classrooms with desk-top models to remove the temptation for depressed students.

A study in the South Indian city of Vellore that was published in The Lancet medical journal in 2004 showed suicides among young women (15 to 19) running at 148 per 100,000 population, against 58 per 100,000 for young men. In comparison, the world average among all age groups is 14.5 per 100,000.

Educators, community leaders and filmmakers are beginning to spotlight the issue.

The federal education ministry this year gave schools the option to eliminate a series of crucial Grade 10 exams, replacing them with a grading system that evaluates a student’s progress through the course of the year. The move is designed to reduce pressure on students.

At the Indian Institute in New Delhi, first-year students are now required to spend 10 hours with a psychologist, the school’s dean of students said in an interview.

On traffic bridges in the city of Jodpur, in Rajasthan state, messages in Hindi script urge students to call a helpline.

Social workers like Johnson are slowly making progress at establishing ties with schools and employers.

“By and large, most schools don’t want us around, they say their students are too busy with studying,” Johnson said, chuckling at the irony.

He started the Aasra Suicide Prevention Helpline in 1998 and in its first few years, averaged about 40 calls from distressed students each week. Now, he and his volunteers field about 175.

The pressure for students to excel here starts long before their senior year.

During Class 10, when students are 16, they take an exam that determines the specialized stream they’ll pursue during their final two years of high school. The science stream is most popular because it leads to university programs in engineering and medicine.

On a recent evening in a middle-class New Delhi neighbourhood, Rati Misra sat in the living room of her modest three-bedroom apartment and groused over India’s ultra-competitive education system.

Her two boys, Samarth, 18, and Shashwat, 15, are likely to pursue careers in business administration. While his mother said Samarth was destined to become a veterinarian, he scored a 60 per cent on his Class 10 exams two years ago.

That scotched any possibility of medical school.

“I understand that we all can’t be heroes, that someone has to be the one offstage clapping, but what they do as a young boy shouldn’t impact them so far down the road,” Misra said.

Before sitting down to their dinner table for a study session, Samarth and his brother Shashwat said they are coping with the pressure of school, even as those around them struggle.

Their 18-year-old cousin killed herself several years ago and only a few weeks earlier, a classmate who lived around the corner did the same.

“It’s not something that’s talked about a lot,” said Shashwat.

There’s no arguing academic pressures are hot topic.

Another ad that aired on Indian television recently showed a number of young Chinese students learning Hindi. The ad’s implicit message: Better do well in school because they’re coming for your jobs.

But the new Kraft Foods malt mix commercial is a positive step and it will be broadcast for a year, said Siddharth Patkar, a company spokesman.

“The portrayal of the mother-child relationship is seen as being very real and in line with the changing mindsets of today’s parents,” Patkar said, adding the message the commercial delivers is that “winning is important, but not at the cost of putting undue pressure on the child.”

Aasra in Scroll.in on the New mental health Bill 2013

HTTP://SCROLL.IN/ARTICLE/655138/GOVERNMENT'S-MOVE-TO-DECRIMINALISE-SUICIDE-IS-HALF-HEARTED

MENTAL HEALTH

Government's move to decriminalise suicide is half-hearted

The Mental Health Bill says that suicide cannot be prosecuted. But it remains a criminal offence under the Indian Penal Code and allows for people who attempt to take their lives to be incarcerated in institutions.

Mridula Chari · 5 months ago

Amendments to the Mental Health Care Bill were approved by the cabinet on Thursday, in an attempt to protect the rights of people suffering from mental illness. But experts have criticised its provisions relating to suicide, even though the proposed legislation claims to decriminalise the action. Unless the Indian Penal Code is also changed, they say, people who attempt to take their own lives can still be prosecuted.

“At the end of the day, suicide will still be a crime,” said Amba Salelkar, a lawyer and disability and mental health rights activist. “If suicide were truly being decriminalised, legislators would have removed it from the IPC itself.”

The bill will be tabled in the Lok Sabha in the budget session in February. The original draft of the bill was filed in the Rajya Sabha in August 2013. A parliamentary committee on health and family welfare submitted their review of changes to the union cabinet.

At present, attempting to kill oneself is illegal under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, and can be punished by a year in prison. The Mental Health Care Bill says that notwithstanding the IPC, anyone attempting suicide “shall be presumed...to have severe stress at the time of attempting suicide and shall not be liable to prosecution and punishment."

It goes on to state that it is the government’s responsibility to help ensure that those who have survived a suicide bid do not attempt it again. This clear puts all those who attempt suicide under the health care provisions of the bill, one clause of which includes the right of the government to incarcerate people of unsound mind for up to three months against their will.

By retaining IPC legislation and classifying suicide as a mental illness, the bill effectively gives the government the right to incarcerate anyone in a mental institution if suspected of having attempted suicide, experts say.

“If suicide were truly being decriminalised, legislators would have removed it from the IPC itself,” said Salelkar. “At the end of the day, suicide will still be a crime. This is what makes me uncomfortable about the bill.”

Dr Bhargavi Davar, another mental health activist, added that the decision to cite the cause of suicide as “severe stress” is dangerous because it allows a much larger range of people to be classified as mentally ill. “Mental illness is defined so broadly, any person is liable to be brought under the bill,” she said. “Who in urban areas is not stressed? Will they also be deemed mentally ill?”

She said that the earlier draft of the bill left open the option for people had attempted suicide but did not have any official diagnosis of mental illness to go to court to prevent themselves from being incarcerated in a mental institution. “How do you prove to the court that someone is not stressed?” she asked.

Both Davar and Salelkar believe that the solution would be to change the IPC, and not mention suicide in the Mental Health Care Bill at all.

Not a deterrent

Most psychiatrists agree that criminalising suicide is illogical. According to them, the law has never served as a deterrent to people wanting to take their own lives. The rate of suicides in India has steadily risen in the past five years.

“It is a good move to decriminalise suicide,” said Dr NN Raju, secretary of the Indian Psychiatric Society. “Suicide is a move taken to end suffering. They think it is the only option left to them. Society has an obligation to help them out, rather than labelling them as criminals.”

Dr Kedarnand Banerjee of the National Institute of Behavioural Sciences concurred. “Suicidal people are least bothered about legislation,” he said. “When the thought comes, it comes. Thinking about the law never stopped anyone from attempting suicide.”

While they welcomed the apparent decriminalisation of suicide, they too were not pleased with its being described as a mental illness.

Labelling suicide as a mental illness is inaccurate, according to Raju. “While severe stress doesn’t necessarily cause suicide, calling somebody mentally ill is not correct either,” he said. “Someone who tries to commit suicide may need the help of mental health professionals, certainly, but trying to commit suicide is not necessarily the result of inherent mental instability.”

According to National Crime Records Bureau figures, which are most likely under-representative, India’s rate of suicide, 11.2 per 100,000 in 2012, is far lower than the global rate of 16 per 100,000.

Within India, nuances emerge. More men kill themselves than women. According to an NCRB report, men kill themselves for economic reasons, while women kill themselves for personal reasons. Housewives formed 18.2 per cent of the total number of suicide attempts in 2012. This is more than over half of the women who were reported to have killed themselves in that year.

The top five specified occupations of those who committed suicide from 2001 to 2012 included housewives, farmers, those in private service, the unemployed and self-employed. These constitute 54 per cent of a total of 1.4 million people who killed themselves during this decade.

“It is necessary to understand that suicide is not an event,” said Johnson Thomas, who works with Mumbai-based suicide helpline Aasra. “It is not a one-time process. People go through different stages of stress and when it comes to a head, that is when they commit suicide.” Thomas, however, believes that the bill will be useful as it will force the government to take the responsibility of therapy after a failed suicide attempt, which is their stated intention.

Dangers of the bill

The social and political consequences of including suicide in the Mental Health Care Bill extend beyond just wrongful incarceration if the person survives, according to Salelkar. For instance, if a housewife were to survive a suicide attempt, they will be classified as mentally unstable and could have custody of their children taken away from them under the Juvenile Justice Act.

There are also cases in which pressure from in-laws for dowry is a pressing cause of women committing suicide. “When the case comes to trial, because she is deemed to be mentally ill, her evidence could become shaky,” said Salelkar. “Even if she doesn’t survive, the fact that suicide is filed under the Mental Health Care Act means that the family that might have abetted the suicide has some more room to wiggle out of being convicted.”

Political acts of protest are also likely to be prosecuted as before. Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for ten years now. Each year, she is released from hospital custody for one day, then re-arrested under section 309 of the IPC. The government can choose to argue that Sharmila is not under severe stress. Since suicide has not been decriminalised, the government will not be obliged to release her from custody.

With this misguided attempt to help suicide survivors, experts say, the government has instead laid the ground open for them to be persecuted further.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Grief: What Do Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll Have to Do with it? by Allison James

Grief: What Do Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll Have to Do with it?

by Allison James

Following a break up, or any other major loss, have you noticed a change in your behavior; things like eating or drinking more? These can become distractions you use to avoid grief.

The activities you use to “take your mind off of it” are what we call STERBs.

What is a STERB?

STERB stands for Short Term Energy Relieving Behaviors.

They are activities you use to distract yourself from painful feelings that follow a major loss.

We’ve all heard the stereotype about what women do after a break up: they eat ice cream, go shopping or find someone new to date. Those activities are short-term energy relieving behaviors.

Most STERB’s are not harmful in themselves. Let’s use shopping as an example. There’s nothing wrong with shopping. But if shopping is used to avoid feelings not only do you avoid dealing with your emotions, but also you could end up with financial problems. It gets worse when shopping no longer gives you relief and stops working.

Trying to distract from grief

What are common STERBs?

Drinking
Sleeping
Eating
Excessive exercise
Sex
Drugs
Gambling
Smoking
Shopping
Video games
Workaholism
Playing on the Internet
Isolation
Keeping Busy

How do STERBs work and why do we use them?

STERBs are activities that create the illusion that they are helping you recover from loss. They distract your attention from sad or painful feelings.

And they work! – but only SHORT TERM

Eventually they stop working.

After I broke up with my first serious boyfriend I was devastated. I would stay up all night playing poker then sleep all day. I was exhausted. The time came when poker stopped working. It no longer distracted me from the fact that my heart was broken. I thought if I stopped to think about the break up I’d start crying and never be able to stop. I took the actions of The Grief Recovery Method. Now I can gamble or stay up if I choose to, but I chose to do so for fun, not because I’m trying to avoid heartache.

What’s wrong with using STERBs?

They only work short-term. There is a difference between short-term and long-term relief. Incomplete grief has a negative effect on your capacity for happiness.

The Grief Recovery Handbook 20th Anniversary expanded Edition uses a great analogy:

“…If your yard is full of weeds, you can cut the weeds to give some short-term relief, but they will grow back. Or you can pull the weeds and eliminate the problem.”

Ask yourself; do you want short-term or long-term relief? If you want long-term relief please look into a Grief Recovery Method Outreach Program near you. Learn more about it here!

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Monday, June 30, 2014

Write-up on Aasra in the BBC

Write-up on Aasra in the BBC

Shantanu Negi’s Facebook suicide prompts shock in India

More on This Story

Related Stories

Facebook adds Samaritans suicide risk alert system

India police investigate Bangalore ‘Facebook suicide’

Why are young Indians killing themselves?

Article in The Star World(Toronto Star) with reference to AASRA

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2011/03/22/as_stressed_indian_students_hit_breaking_point_new_ad_urges_parents_to_chill.html

As stressed Indian students hit breaking point, new ad urges parents to chill

TV commercial sparks debate about one of India’s most pressing social issues: the off-the-chart stress India’s children face to excel in school.

Aasra in Scroll.in on the New mental health Bill 2013

Friday, June 27, 2014

Grief: What Do Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll Have to Do with it? by Allison James

Grief: What Do Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll Have to Do with it?

Trying to distract from grief

How do STERBs work and why do we use them?

What’s wrong with using STERBs?

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