Why is the rate of suicide among Indian women so high?

Priya Gupta

Working with holistic nutrition.. | Posted on 14-Sep-2018

A paper by Rajiv Radhakrishnan and Chittaranjan Andrade, Suicide: An Indian Perspective, tells us:

“According to the WHO, every year, almost one million people die from suicide and 20 times more people attempt suicide; a global mortality rate of 16 per 100,000, or one death every 40 seconds and one attempt every 3 seconds, on average. Suicide worldwide was estimated to represent 1.8% of the total global burden of disease in 1998; in 2020, this figure is projected to be 2.4% in countries with market and former socialist economies.”

Of these numbers and stats, 37% of women who commit suicide in the world every year, are Indian. Psychologists and physicians aim at achieving a high prevention rate, which needs the incorporation of proper health, psychological, cultural support.

The measures that are needed for prevention, suggest a lot of reasons for this high rate of suicide in India.

It’s not unknown, that the problem of suicide is more related to an individual’s mental health than physical. So the major reasons are psychological, which of course, take birth from Indian cultural practices.

It’s an interesting thing to note that even diet plans and change in meals affect women’s mental state to a great degree, so the amount of effect of a country’s culture could be massively imposing for women’s mental health.

It is also interesting to note that women all over, and not just Indian women, are way more vulnerable than men, to depression –a major reason of suicide among youth.

Concluding from all these facts and speculations, I would say that such a high rate of Indian women in the list of those women who commit suicide owes to the inferior status of them in India, which has not been curbed yet, even after so much hullabaloo over Feminism all over.

In India, the inferiority of women is not just superficial but very deep rooted in cultural practices like festivals, fasts, and so on. From dowry to heartbreaks, to having to become mother in a very early age, Indian women suffer from many physical and mental traumas in their lifetime, which justifies the trends and numbers before us.