Meet on rising trend of suicide among Idu-Mishmis

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

Itagar, Jan 28: The Idu Mishmi Cultural and Literary Society (IMCLS) in collaboration with the Samaritans Mumbai is going to organise a two-day workshop on ‘Suicide Prevention among the Idu-Mishmi Community of Aruchal Pradesh’ from February 6 next at Roing in Lower Dibang Valley district.

The basic objective of the workshop, other than to increase awareness about the magnitude of the problem and the availability of effective prevention strategies, is to identify key stakeholders and to allocate them with clear demarcated roles and specific responsibilities to help in assessing the requirement and availability of resources for any suicide prevention initiatives.

The sparsely populated Idu-Mishmi community has been haunted by rising number of suicide cases in the past decade, informed Dr Tarun Mene, post doctoral fellow at Rajiv Gandhi University, who is heading the organising committee of the workshop.

Mene has done his PhD on suicide among the Idu-Mishmi community.

“Since 2001-2010, the rate of suicide in the community was 51.6 per 100000 population as per studies, which is perhaps the highest amongst the indigenous community of India”, informed Dr Mene.

“Suicide among the Idu-Mishmi is highly underestimated. During the same period (2001-2010), the official data estimated only 7 cases of suicide in Dibang Valley district, whereas, the field data reported the occurrence of at least 49 cases”, he added.

Suicide Prevention Action Plan for the community would be developed wherein, a core committee would be formed for the preparation of community specific action plans by involving all the stakeholders, and the main aim of these action plans will be to eradicate the problems of disintegration and helplessness of the society and its groups, and develop a positive attitude as one of the remedies for prevention of suicide.

“This will also include viabilities for setting up of counselling centers, helpline, publishing literatures in the educatiol institution, gram panchayats and educating on the human resources magement (Idu-Mishmi population) and values, Dr Mene pointed out.

Priority to research and alysis would be given to the subject through this workshop in order to estimate the need and effectiveness of preventive measures, to search for new ways of prevention, to establish suicidal risk groups on the base of primary demographic statistics and special research data, to make conclusions and recommendations on implementation and improving suicide prevention, and to work out special target suicide reduction programmes, he added.