Implementation of a comprehensive surveillance system for recording suicides and attempted suicides in rural India

WHO reports that 78 of the 140 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) do not have a registration system for suicides and attempted suicides. Absence of data on suicide and attempted suicide in LMICs, which account for 79% of suicides worldwide, is a major impediment in understanding the magnitude of the problem and formulating prevention strategies to reduce suicide and self-harm. A comprehensive surveillance system has the potential to address this data gap. The objective of this study is to describe the development of a comprehensive surveillance system in rural India by adding a community based component and reflect on its added value in obtaining data on suicide and attempted suicide compared with relying only on hospital and police records.

The comprehensive system consists of three components. Community surveillance involved collecting information on suicides and attempted suicides from third party key informants such as village heads, teachers, priests, shopkeepers, private physicians, private hospitals and community health workers. The second component consisted of data from public health facilities. The final component consisted of suicide data from police records. Information was collected for a period of 12 months from August 2018 to July 2019 from 116 villages (population 377 276) in Gujarat, India.

An average of 710 community informants were interviewed each month (mean: 6.72 informants per village). The community surveillance system identified 67 cases of suicide compared with 30 cases by hospital and police records (Cochran's Q test 67.9 p<0.01) and 70 attempted suicides compared with 51 from the hospital and police records (Cochran's Q test 66.6 p<0.01).

This is the first report of implementing a large-scale comprehensive surveillance system for suicide and attempted suicide in a LMIC. The combination of community surveillance system and official data from hospital and police records addresses the problem of under-reporting of suicide and suicide attempts in India and other LMIC.