With the 2023 tally of suicides in Kota touching 26, Rajib Dasgupta of the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, JNU, explains to TOI that it is time to put a public health lens on the problem
How can suicides be compared to a disease outbreak?
The US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a suicide cluster as a group of suicides, suicide attempts, or self-harm events that occur closer together in time and space than would normally be expected in a given community.
In principle and practice, this aligns to the WHO definition of an outbreak. The Kota situation quite clearly is a suicide cluster. In specific, this is a case of a point cluster (or spatial-temporal cluster) where a greater-than-expected number of suicides occurs within a time period in a specific location. Contagion is best understood as the situation where one person’s suicide, due to its circumstances and the publicity around it, triggers the risk of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and/or deaths by suicide in others who are already vulnerable to suicidal thoughts or behaviours, leading to suicide clusters. This is certainly at play here.
The US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a suicide cluster as a group of suicides, suicide attempts, or self-harm events that occur closer together in time and space than would normally be expected in a given community.
In principle and practice, this aligns to the WHO definition of an outbreak. The Kota situation quite clearly is a suicide cluster. In specific, this is a case of a point cluster (or spatial-temporal cluster) where a greater-than-expected number of suicides occurs within a time period in a specific location. Contagion is best understood as the situation where one person’s suicide, due to its circumstances and the publicity around it, triggers the risk of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and/or deaths by suicide in others who are already vulnerable to suicidal thoughts or behaviours, leading to suicide clusters. This is certainly at play here.