Community Contexts of Suicidal Behaviour and Mental Health

The Swiss Tropical Institute (STI) is collaborating with two leading university medical centres in India to advance studies of suicidal behaviour in India and Switzerland, and to build research capacities among collaborators. Research questions concerning psychological and social stressors associated with deliberate self-harm have been formulated in the context of studies for suicide prevention and with respect to broader implications for community mental health. Cultural epidemiological methods developed at the STI in Switzerland have resulted from studies concerned with the relationship of local illness-related cultural experience, meaning, and behaviour with reference to health system priorities for health promotion, and for prevention and treatment of both infectious diseases (e.g., tuberculosis and and malaria) and mental health problems. The current focus of this research on suicidal behaviour aims to contribute to suicide prevention efforts in India and Switzerland, and also to show how the issues that motivate suicidal behaviour are more broadly relevant to interests and planning for mental health in clinical practice focussing on patients and public health planning concerned with populations.

Activities of the current research include three integrated components: (1) The visit to STI in Basel of Dr. AN Chowdhury, a research scientist leading field studies in West Bengal India. A collaborative effort over the course of his stay will focus on analysis and reporting of research data from field studies in the rural Sundarban Region of West Bengal. In Basel he will also assist in supervising and examining a PhD student working on that project. (2) A second collaborator working on similar studies in an urban Mumbai setting, Dr. SR Parkar, will also visit Basel for collaborative analysis and reporting of field research in an urban slum and in psychiatric clinics. These meetings will facilitate comparative study of urban and rural data form India, as well as experience from a comparable study underway at the University Hospital in Basel. (3) A meeting of these collaborators in Mumbai will plan further field studies and present reports from prior cultural epidemiological studies at the annual conference of the Global Forum for Health Research.

Suicidal behaviour is a particularly appropriate focus for our mental health studies because it necessarily includes cross-cutting aspects of illness and well-being beyond any single diagnosis. Although interests of mental health are often neglected in international health, the approach proposed here has a broad range of applications not only for suicide prevention but also for community mental health programmes, intersectoral programme interests (e.g., involving safe pesticide use), and applications of cultural epidemiology to other health priorities, such as infectious diseases. Proposed efforts to clarify sociocultural determinants of mental health problems contribute directly to priorities for general health, illustrating the point made in WHO’s seminal formulation of health, which in defining health acknowledges the central role of mental health.

Contacts:

Dr. Mitchell G. Weiss
Professor and Head
Department of Public Health and Epidemiology
Swiss Tropical Institute
CH-4002 Basel
Tel: 061 284 82 84; Fax: 061 284 81 05;
E-mail: Mitchell-G.Weiss@unibas.ch

Prof. Dr. Arabinda N. Chowdhury
Institute of Psychiatry and Calcutta University
7, D. L. Khan Road
Calcutta - 700 025
INDIA
Tel: +91 33 2223 6048; Fax: +91 33 2223 6048;
Email: anc@cal.vsnl.net.in

Prof. Dr. Shubhangi R. Parkar
Professor and Head
Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital
Mumbai, India
Tel: +91 22 3096 5065; Fax: +91 22 2418 6662;
Email: pshubhangi@gmail.com