>>Overview Suicide
Suicide may be defined as the deliberate ending of one’s own life in an act of self-harm. Attempted suicide is the unsuccessful suicidal act. According to experts, suicides are mostly related to each other by the common link of emotional isolations, perceived sense of lack of attachment to anybody and a certain lack of ability to cope and adjust with the environment. Research also says that certain forms of mental disorders like depression plays a part in the 90% of the cases of suicides.
Often personal crisis unleashes in man a sense of stress and mental isolation as he feels despair, grief, and hopelessness to control his situation. All these can eventually lead to suicide. According to the crisis theory, it is possible to come out of such a situation if a person develops healthy coping skills in the following areas:
* Involving oneself in the routine activities of the day.
* Having a supportive group of friends and family.
* Being physically well.
* Having a good quality of life.
Lack of all these can lead to the ultimate desperate situation in which an individual inflicts the ultimate self-harm and becomes suicidal. Studies done on people who had attempted suicides show that these patients have a high chance of resorting to attempts of suicide again at any other stressful points in life and thus often needs long time psychological interventions to help them develop proper coping skills required to adjust to all types of life situations. It is difficult to gather information about suicides, as in spite of knowledge and keen instincts, physicians and psychiatrists all over the world have not been able to stop suicides of their patients as most of them happen very suddenly. People who had attempted suicides had given no outward signs of their mental frame of minds. At times patients have informed their physicians that they were feeling good about life and have begun to enjoy themselves, only days before they had committed suicides. All these makes keeping records of a suicidal mind very difficult. Physicians whose patients had taken this ultimate step often find themselves at loss to explain why did the individual take the path to self-destruction. Most of them had felt that they thought they knew everything about their patients in question, but it seems that the element of unknown still lurked somewhere.

>> Youth and Suicides
Here are some facts about suicides and youths:
* Suicide is the sixth leading cause of death in the age group of 5 to 14 years.
* This is the third leading cause of death in the age group of 15 to 24 years of age.
* Suicide rates are higher in males than in females, although the margin is not much.

Some risk factors for youths who commit suicide are the following:
* Suicidal thoughts.
* Psychiatric illness like depression, bipolar disorder, some forms of anxiety disorders, impulsive aggressive behavior, etc.
* Drug or alcohol addiction.
* Previous suicide attempts
* Easy access to firearms
* Inability to cope with situational stress

>>Indian Context
According to the IPC, the relevant sections are the following:
Section 305. Abetment of suicide of child or insane person
If any person under eighteen years of age, any insane person, any delirious person, any idiot, or any person in a state of intoxication, commits suicide, whoever abets the commission of such suicide, shall be punished with death or 104[imprisonment for life], or imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.
Section 306. Abetment of suicide
If any person commits suicide, whoever abets the commission of such suicide, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term, which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

>>Depression And Suicide
While depression may not led to suicide always, of all the causes of suicide, major people who have committed suicide had been suffering from depression. The severity of depression often leads to the increased risk of committing suicide. Recent data on depression suggests that about 2% of the people suffering from depression are most vulnerable to suicidal thoughts and may commit suicide. For the institutionalized patients in hospital, about 4% of them commit suicide from depression. Research also suggests that people who have attempted suicide once may do so again, and institutionalized patients are three times as likely to attempt suicide repeatedly than the patients treated for depression in the outpatient only. Of the patients with a history of a lifetime of depression, men are 7 times more likely than women to commit suicide. When looked into the data of the people who had committed suicide, about 60% of them were suffering from emotional disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, dysthymia etc.

>>Helping Suicidal Person
It is important for all of us to understand what we as family or friend can do to stop a person from committing suicide. Although the first step in such a condition can be getting medical or psychiatric help from professionals, in real life this may be a difficult object to achieve. Various agencies working on suicide prevention had offered the following guidelines to help someone who threatens to commit suicide:
* Talk directly and matter-of-factly with the person about suicide.
* Allow the person to speak and listen to him without making any judgments.
* Do not let your own feelings of shock or other opinions stop the person from sharing his thoughts with you.
* Get involved with the person and show him that you are around anytime he needs you to hear him out.