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Abstract
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We congratulate Lakshmi Vijayakumar and colleagues for their paper on suicide prevention in India.
In this Health Policy paper, the authors called for public health approaches tackling suicide at all levels of the health service system. Vijayakumar and colleagues noted self-harm as an important target, but with scarce evidence beyond a small number of intervention studies in adults.
One neglected group that deserves further mention is young people (under 25 years of age) who self-harm. Although it is difficult to make definitive claims about the prevalence of self-harm in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to insufficient evidence, self-harm remains an important issue in many LMICs, including India.
Adolescents who self-harm carry high lifetime risks of suicide and all-cause mortality, as well as other health and social consequences in adulthood.
To address self-harm attempts, Vijayakumar and colleagues recommended simple scalable interventions such as brief contact intervention, developed by WHO and the Healthy Activity Program, delivered to people with moderate to severe depression in primary care through lay counsellors. Although supported by some positive findings, these interventions might not cater to the developmental needs of adolescents and young people who self-harm. Adolescents who self-harm often have poor emotion regulation and social problem-solving skills...
Language: en |