Why are Indian Housewives Committing Suicide?

Abstract

The third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the United Nations is to guarantee healthy lives and advance well-being for all ages. The suicide rate, or the number of suicides per one lakh people, serves as a crucial indicator for Target 3.4 of this aim, which calls for countries to work to reduce premature mortality through enhancing mental health and well-being. Unfortunately, this expectation has not been met by the trend in India in recent years. According to epidemiology, suicide fatalities are more common in males than in women around the world. But the suicide death rate among Indian women in 2016 alone was 2.1 times higher than the global suicide death rate for women and is still increasing in recent times while reducing it remains a pipe dream. We discovered that being a housewife alone increases an Indian woman's risk of suicide death from 0.013 percent to 2.74 percent (more than 200 hundred-fold). The country’s societal response to this issue lies in preventing suicides among India's most outstanding yet under-appreciated population—housewives and homemakers. The high risk of suicide among these women is a serious public health concern that has to be addressed right away. Its complexity can only be addressed by a scaffolding approach across domains, community involvement, and awareness.