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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The pandemic’s hidden cost: Suicides among Indians who lost jobs and income -Tabassum Barnagarwala

The pandemic’s hidden cost: Suicides among Indians who lost jobs and income -Tabassum Barnagarwala

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published Published on Mar 22, 2022   modified Modified on Mar 23, 2022

-Scroll.in

India saw an unprecendented economic upheaval in the last two years. With it came a mental health crisis – and a wave of suicides.

Trigger warning: This article contains references to suicide and some people might find it disturbing.

In December 2020, in response to the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai decided to set up a dedicated mental-health helpline for slum residents of the city’s M-East ward.

These slums are home to migrant labourers, people employed in the unorganised sector, and small-scale traders living in cramped one-room spaces with their families. Volunteers distributed pamphlets door-to-door, explaining that through the helpline, trained counselors would telephonically counsel people for problems such as depression and anxiety.

But very few of the 10,000 calls that have been made to the helpline so far were from people seeking help with mental health – most needed rations, jobs and funds to pay children’s school fees.

“We realised we cannot tell people to not worry if they were starving for food and had no money,” Srishti Jaitley, a counsellor at the helpline, said.

The helpline volunteers began building a resource pool of non-profit organisations and donors, and putting callers who needed help in touch with them. “In the process we tried to counsel them and found high level of anxiety and suicidal thoughts,” Jaitley said. “Men who earned well before the pandemic were jobless. They felt loss of dignity and shame in standing in a queue for free ration.”

The pamphlets were distributed in 26,000 households, to a lakh or so people – 10% of this total number reached out for aid.

But while many availed of the helpline’s services, there were some who never received a pamphlet, and never heard of it. Kalpana Sharma and her husband Manish were among them. She still wonders what pushed him over the edge.

Rise in suicides

Four months ago, on November 14, Manish Sharma video recorded his suicide on a phone camera in his home in Mankhurd slum, while Kalpana and her two daughters, aged seven and five, were in Hyderabad to attend a relative’s wedding. (Names of those who died by suicide or attempted it, and their family members, have been changed in this story to protect their privacy.)

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Scroll.in, 22 March, 2022, https://scroll.in/article/1019925/the-pandemics-hidden-cost-suicides-among-working-class-indians-who-lost-jobs-and-income?fbclid=IwAR0_5Ry4LDRvG6NxQqV_Wt2TbrEGG1tA3yLwr4E3TWttQALSmJXsoBT49oQ


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