WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY
Help is just a call away
Mumbai: Listening therapy works, insists Johnson Thomas. He should know. Thomas runs a 24×7 suicide helpline, Aasra, out of Navi Mumbai and he gets a minimum of eight serious callers every day. Just listening to them helps them a great deal, he says.
Psychiatrist Harish Shetty points out that suicides are rarely impulsive decisions.
There is a long-standing reason that prompts such an act. The trigger could be a seemingly simple incident, he said on Monday.
And, at that moment when everything and every action seems unbearable, helplines can be a lifeline, insists Freny Mahindra.
Mahindra is associated with the Samaritan Helpline, the citys oldest phone helpline of over 45 years.
When people have reached a stage where they feel they have to kill themselves, a talk with a stranger helps. They cannot open up to a known persons but anonymity helps in such circumstances. Volunteers just listen and, even as the person speaks, s/he feels that the problem is melting away, she analyses.
The helpline run by Samaritans still attends to an average of seven calls every day despite going through a series of problems in relocating a year ago.
Helplines dont just help affected persons. They also play an indirect role, Thomas says, illustrating his point with an example.
Aasra got a call from a man who said that he had noticed a well-dressed woman walking up and down a road for hours, looking helpless and disoriented. The man wanted to know if he should speak to the woman, help her and how. We guided him and eventually met the woman who was obviously mentally ill, he recalled. Asara completes a decade of existence this Saturday
Last year, a medical research paper showed how helplines played a role in suicide prevention.
Suicide is emerging as a serious public health issue and it is time the state woke up to the emergency and set up interventions like suicide helplines, Shetty said.