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Every time a schoolgoing child dies by suicide, we respond the same way.
There is outrage. There are hashtags. There are promises of “strict action.” And then, there is policy.
India recorded over 1.7 lakh suicides in 2023, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. Among them, thousands were students. Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death among young people aged 15-29. These are not abstract numbers. They are classrooms with empty benches. They are parents who will never recover. They are schools that continue functioning the next morning.
Consider the alleged suicide of a schoolgirl in Jaipur in November 2025. Public anger mounted, investigations followed, and eventually the school’s affiliation was cancelled. A punitive response. A visible one. But the larger question lingers: what systemic safeguards failed before that cancellation?
Violence among children does not erupt in isolation; it is often the tip of a much larger iceberg of untreated anxiety, depression, bullying, family stress, and emotional neglect.
More recently, three minor sisters allegedly died by suicide in Ghaziabad. In the aftermath, headlines rushed to frame the story around “gaming addiction.” As if a mobile game alone could explain such despair. As if simplifying a tragedy makes it easier to digest. In between the sensational details about family complexities and alleged online influences, one truth gets buried: suicide is rarely about one trigger. It is almost always the result of layered vulnerabilities — mental health struggles, family dynamics, social pressures, academic stress, and lack of timely intervention.
But here is the paradox. While the country grapples with rising adolescent distress, policy responses continue to feel procedural rather than preventive.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has amended its affiliation bylaws, mandating schools to appoint a Counselling & Wellness Teacher (Socio-Emotional Counsellor) and a Career Counsellor, maintaining a ratio of one counsellor for up to 500 students.
On paper, this sounds progressive.
In practice, let us pause and imagine it.
One counsellor. 500 adolescents. 500 emotional histories. 500 family systems. 500 social media ecosystems. 500 academic anxieties.
If each student needed just one hour of individual support in a year, that alone would require 500 hours—not counting crisis interventions, documentation, parent meetings, workshops, teacher consultations, career guidance sessions, preventive programs, and emergencies. The arithmetic is revealing.
We say mental health matters. But we fund it like a side project. We demand accountability after tragedy. But we rarely build capacity before it.
The contradiction deepens when we examine the treatment gap. National mental health surveys have consistently shown that over 70 percent of individuals who need mental health care in India do not receive it. In schools, where early intervention could change life trajectories, support is often limited, outsourced, or reactive.
What message are we sending adolescents?
That their distress is real — but only after it becomes fatal. That counselling is important — but only within a compliance framework. That mental health is urgent — but not urgent enough for structural investment.
Cancelling a school’s affiliation after a suicide may satisfy immediate outrage, but it does not automatically create emotionally safer environments elsewhere. Blaming gaming apps may comfort adults seeking simple answers, but it ignores deeper systemic failures.
We cannot keep oscillating between denial and damage control.
If we truly believe suicide is preventable — and global evidence suggests many suicides are — then prevention must be proportional to the problem. That means more than one counsellor ticking compliance boxes. It means embedding socio-emotional learning into curriculum, reducing academic hyper-competition, training teachers to identify warning signs, creating safe reporting mechanisms, and ensuring counsellors are accessible, independent, and adequately supported.
Mental health cannot remain symbolic. Because right now, it feels like this:
We mourn loudly. We legislate modestly. We forget quickly. And then we repeat. If mental health continues to be treated like a checkbox — a clause in an affiliation bylaw — then yes, it is a joke.
And the joke is on all of us.
(Juhi is a psychologist and educator from Hisar with over nine years of experience. She is the founder of Peace Point, and writes passionately about mental health and education, drawing from her professional journey to inspire awareness and change. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)