At the heart of the national Capital, thousands of people from across the country joined the protests in Jantar Mantar with the hope to strengthen the education system of India. An indisputable fact is that at least 21 students died by suicide over an exam paper leaked earlier this year. This along with the recent statistic that 14,488 students died by suicide in 2024 presents a grim picture of the status of mental health and suicide prevention in India. As discussions focus on tech interventions to improve the examination structure, it is necessary to re-centre conversations on mental health and suicide prevention among youth in India.
Higher educational institutions (HEIs) are key spaces for growth and interaction for young individuals. As spaces that promise to expand opportunity, these cannot function as sites where distress is normalised, or worse, belittled. Multiple instances of suicides have been reported in the last five years at premier educational institutions in India such as IITs, NLUS, AIIMs, with Al Jazeera reporting that nearly 65 suicides took place in IITs alone since 2021. Yet, these tragedies are sadly often portrayed as individual failures instead of systemic challenges. In Amit Kumar v. Union of India, the Supreme Court shattered this narrative, identifying “extremely rigid” attendance policies, poorly planned academic curricula, faculty shortages, and the “excessive reliance on inexperienced guest faculty” as the reasons for academic stress which tragically culminate in suicide. It also recognised that suicide cannot be reduced to individual acts, and observed the contribution of caste-based discrimination, financial stress, and sexual harassment towards this.
Poor mental health is compounded by isolation and structural marginality. HEIs assume that every student enters with the same social and economic capital, but the reality is far more complex. Students belonging to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, persons with disabilities, queer individuals, individuals from rural or non-English-speaking backgrounds face challenges that extend beyond academics. For some, the campus remains inaccessible, while the others struggle with language barriers and subtle forms of exclusion. As someone who recently graduated, witnessing the following was not an uncommon site: a wheelchair user forced to take a longer detour because the academic block has no functioning ramp or students quietly leaving discussions because they are not fluent in English or queer students spending months to identify and form support groups they can safely approach. All this unfolds while being expected to meet the same academic standards as their more privileged peers. When these structural inequalities remain invisible, academic life becomes as solitary, as it is daunting. Institutional support does little to offer relief. Ideals of inclusivity or access to health care mostly exist only on paper: Health care facilities are under-equipped and mental health services are treated as a secondary concern.
{{/usCountry}}Poor mental health is compounded by isolation and structural marginality. HEIs assume that every student enters with the same social and economic capital, but the reality is far more complex. Students belonging to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, persons with disabilities, queer individuals, individuals from rural or non-English-speaking backgrounds face challenges that extend beyond academics. For some, the campus remains inaccessible, while the others struggle with language barriers and subtle forms of exclusion. As someone who recently graduated, witnessing the following was not an uncommon site: a wheelchair user forced to take a longer detour because the academic block has no functioning ramp or students quietly leaving discussions because they are not fluent in English or queer students spending months to identify and form support groups they can safely approach. All this unfolds while being expected to meet the same academic standards as their more privileged peers. When these structural inequalities remain invisible, academic life becomes as solitary, as it is daunting. Institutional support does little to offer relief. Ideals of inclusivity or access to health care mostly exist only on paper: Health care facilities are under-equipped and mental health services are treated as a secondary concern.
{{/usCountry}}For mental health particularly, counsellors appointed by HEIs are too few in number and are often insufficiently trained to respond to the complex challenges students face. In particular, they are not trained in inclusive approaches, limiting their ability to support students from vulnerable backgrounds. The absence of a robust confidentiality mechanism compounds this issue. In 2021, a 19-year-old individual discovered that his psychiatrist breached confidentiality to reveal his sexual orientation to his mother, without his consent. The absence of a robust confidentiality mechanism, especially for minors, severely weakens students' faith in mental health services. The uncertainty surrounding the confidentiality of their most personal experiences forces many to bottle up their feelings and not share at all. This absence reflects that mental health is not treated as an issue requiring structural reform. If institutions approached it systematically, they would recognise that meaningful support demands more than appointing counsellors, it requires better training, faculty sensitisation, peer support groups, and clear confidentiality protocols. This institutional apathy deepens isolation into withdrawal and ergo, this despair becomes a matter of life and death.
Addressing these challenges requires large-scale re-haul of educational infrastructure, such as building institutional access to mental health care, introducing academic reform in HEIs, and creating social inclusion for vulnerable students. Currently, counsellors are not legally recognised under any law in India. To create access to care, it is important to recognise counsellors as mental health professionals under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. In addition to this recognition, procedures of confidentiality, privacy, and prohibition of conversion therapy must be introduced. Only such counsellors who fulfill the minimum standards set by MHA must be hired in HEIs in ratio to the students on campus.
Further, training of mental health professionals must account for queer-affirmative, caste and disability-informed, and gender-sensitive methodologies. This will allow an inclusive approach to students from varied backgrounds to access health care services.
HEIs must also attempt to create physical spaces where students can create empathetic networks especially after triggering events. To achieve this, similar to the creation of regulations on anti-ragging on campuses, the Court must urge the creation of regulations on mental health and suicide preventions. These regulations should cover the manner of managing mental health services and suicide prevention strategies for different education settings across the country.
An educational institution as a site of learning must be able to address preventable despair.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Shireen Yachu, senior resident fellow and Mandar Prakhar, research fellow, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.