Suicide helplines fight to stay alive

Pillai.

He adds that the role of trained volunteers is very important because India is short of mental health professionals.

“A psychiatrist in India is not able to give enough time to patients. We need to understand that suicide is not always a mental illness, it could be a result of emotional stress, which can be mitigated by talking to someone. Volunteers are trained to listen proactively and help people ventilate,” says Pillai.

“Unlike in the West where people take pride in volunteering, very few young people in India come forward to volunteer. We mostly get retired people.”

Nimesh Desai, director, Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), Delhi, says that suicide prevention is a multi-faced strategy, so different models may suit different people.

He points out that the anonymous telephone services, based on the befriending model, are very different from most professional models.

“It is based on basic human spirit of helping other human beings in distress as unpaid volunteer effort. There are some inherent advantages and disadvantages of this model. So in a society like ours all models are worth encouraging, ” he says.

Volunteers working with helplines say that pulling people from the brink is not an easy job. Brijinder Grewal, 51, who volunteers five hours a week at Senhi, says that the reasons for growing emotional distress is the fact that isolation has increased, the family has taken a backseat, and people are scared of being judged.

A suicide attempt, she says, is essentially a cry for help.

“These days a majority of our calls are from teenagers with suicidal thoughts over heartbreak. We did not get such cases when we started as volunteers 19 years back. The social media, which promotes people to compare their lives with others, has also become a source of distress,” she says.

So are not volunteers getting affected by the perpetual tales of pain and misery that they hear? “It overwhelms us at times. We have to learn to switch off. Besides, we take mandatory breaks.”

VIPIN KUMAR/HT PHOTO A volunteer at Snehi attends to callers. The organisation has reduced its operation time from eight hours, seven days a week to five hours six days a week.