New Delhi : Keeping young people safe from suicide isn’t about more locked terraces, barred windows or cellphone bans. It isn’t about turning schools and universities into fortresses. Safety, for young people, comes from something far more ordinary and human – being listened to when they say they’re struggling. Being checked in on. Having teachers who notice when something might be off. Knowing that if they are bullied or harassed, someone will intervene and stand with them, not against them. Knowing that when they struggle, there are people and places they can genuinely turn to for help.
I am reminded of this every day in my work with Sangath, a community mental health research organisation. Here, young people regularly tell us, sometimes for the first time ever, that they feel unheard, dismissed, or reduced to their marks. I still remember pausing a student workshop last year when Class 12 board exam results were announced, helping students check their marks online and supporting one who felt too afraid to go home and tell his parents.
We hear the same stories over and over again: “No one at home believed me; they told me to snap out of it.” “I didn’t want to trouble my parents.” “I kept asking for help, but nothing changed.” “It’s too expensive and too far away to go see a counsellor.”
These are not the words of a few isolated students. They reflect a national crisis of silence, fear and a lack of fundamental support systems.
Warning systems
Suicide is the leading cause of death among youth aged 15-29 in India. Yet our prevention systems remain fragmented, reactive and overly focused on crisis management. We rush to install cameras or railings after a tragedy, but we rarely ask the difficult question: why were so many warning signs ignored in the first place?
Something is terribly wrong when a 9-year-old dies by suicide after complaining about bullying for a year-and-a-half – five times on the very day she died. The Central Board of Secondary Education inquiry highlighted missing railings and unmonitored CCTV cameras, but the deeper failure was this: a child repeatedly asked for help, and adults did not respond.
Something is terribly wrong when a 16-year-old reports harassment by teachers for months, begs to change schools, and is met with threats instead of support.
Something is terribly wrong when a 19-year-old is beaten for speaking a different language and dies by suicide the same day.
These are not cases only from marginalised districts: they are also from top-tier private schools and cities where counsellors exist on paper and anti-bullying committees can be proudly listed in brochures or websites. They represent only a small fraction of youth suicides in India. Yet even here, the most basic structures for student wellbeing, safety, respect and responsiveness are missing.
As someone working specifically in youth mental health and suicide prevention for over 15 years, I still notice how carefully I must choose my words when speaking to schools. Even today, conversations about suicide feel like an “us versus them” issue, as if distress can be solved by offering one-on-one counselling or handing out a helpline number.
Yes, these supports are very important, but they do not address the structural discrimination, exclusion, relentless academic pressure, and the deep fear of disappointing families that students live with every day.
Isolation and helplessness
Young people often tell us that the hardest part isn’t the specific problem itself, it’s the isolation and helplessness they feel. The belief that no adult will take their fears or problems seriously. The loneliness of carrying pain they feel they must hide. Youth suicide prevention is an intractable and complex social as well as public health problem for which a one-size-fits-all approach will not succeed.
Without intersectoral and collaborative interventions at family, community, institutional, and policy levels, it is impossible to address the range of risk factors young people face – academic pressure, rapid social change, gender- and sexuality-based discrimination, socially conservative attitudes that prohibit relationships and marriage across castes or religions, caste-based harassment and sexual abuse.
It will take creating a culture where distress is not a shameful secret but a signal for collective care. Where young people’s struggles are met with compassion, not discipline. Where prevention is not an afterthought but a shared responsibility.
One example of this approach is our Outlive programme, a youth-led, youth-centred suicide prevention initiative. The programme is anchored in the belief that suicide prevention is everyone’s business: students, teachers and parents all play a part in preventing suicide.
We train young volunteers (aged 18–24) with lived experience or a deep personal understanding of distress to provide anonymous, text-based peer support, safety planning and referrals. We also run workshops with educational institutions and multilingual myth-busting campaigns to shift how we talk about suicide, focusing on breaking stigma and shame and building pathways to help.
Every time a young person dies by suicide despite repeatedly asking for help, it is not just a tragedy – it is an indictment of the systems meant to protect them.
Pattie Gonsalves is project director of the Youth Mental Health Group at Sangath and leads research and public engagement on adolescent and youth mental health. She specialises in co-designing interventions addressing anxiety, depression and suicide prevention. Pattie is also the founder of It’s Ok To Talk, a digital storytelling campaign on youth mental health.
