Mental Health and Suicide Prevention

Mental health refers to cognitive, behavioural, emotional well-being of an individual. This term is broadly used synonymously for any kind of mental disorder. Though early physical well-being was given more importance to the Mental health. Mental health can affect daily living relationships and overall life. Various socio – economic and physical factors, occupation, education, ethnicity, can affect an individual’s mental health. For long psychotic care was either ignored or was a misnomer for being insane.
With the ongoing Pandemic along with the other situations that surfaced the insurgency of mental health issues surfaced rampantly. The number of people seeking help for mental stress or mental ailments.

The Spherule Foundation has been working round the clock towards this issue. We conducted many counselling sessions in Pune Municipal schools, there has been overwhelming response to these sessions by the students, teachers and even the parents. We have provided the teachers, training on how to handle the psychiatric issues at their professional level and also how to handle the issues with children at the preliminary level. Topics covered were Teenage brain, behaviour, priorities, sleep patterns, importance of peers, Interaction with parents and emotional challenges faced, how to deal with such situations.

Various sessions were and are conducted at the community centres where it was an eye opening session for us as an NGO too as the health issues for the workers , migrant workers, household helps, security guards and various other such professions had different kinds of mental issues and each to be handled at different levels.

Major challenges faced by an individual is realising that there is an issue and he/she needs the help. In the absence of the help, the person can take an extreme step of self-harming, inflicting pain on themselves and extreme case of committing suicide. A lingering feeling of being alone and helpless forces an individual to take extreme steps. Mental health issues need to be taken seriously and many myths across the same needs to be shattered,

The Myth that People who have the tendency of being aloof and not social are largely at the greater risk of inflicting self pain and committing suicide. This myth busted when lot of known celebrities and influential people were victim of mental health issuses and commtted suicide. Preventive measures need to be taken and issues need to be addressed at the early stage of identifying the issues. Various support groups NGOS and individuals are working towards being supported to such individuals. People from various strata of the societies irrespective of their socio- economic background, financial conditions or physical well-being are/can likely fall into the category of people who will be pushing themselves to such an act.