World Suicide Prevention Day is observed on September 10 since 2003 to raise awareness regarding suicide and the actions that can be taken to prevent it globally.
The observance is jointly managed by the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP); the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH).
When a depressed student gets into a hopeless and helpless state, to prevent suicide, he or she is to be given 'psycho-social treatment' or an intervention is carried out by a psycho-therapist with proper diagnosis.
In social psychology, the term 'psycho-social' pertains to an individual's cognitive development in social environment and a psycho-social treatment includes ‘diagnosis, structured counselling, motivational enhancement, case management, care-coordination, psychotherapy and relapse prevention’ to mitigate and eliminate suicidal tendency.
In social psychology, depression is viewed as a mental state of being negative, with no hope for the future, coupled with an inability to see the positives in the situation.
The cause of many suicides by students lies in the school settings itself. If teaching is seen as a profession, a teacher must work as a psycho-social counselor
and should be well versed with social pedagogy to create the classroom as a web of supportive relationships to eliminate the school-based cause of suicide.
According to Dr Peter Gray, author of the book "Free to Learn", the tragedy is that we continue to make school ever more stressful, even though research shows that none of this is necessary. He observes that the young people learn far more, far better, with much less stress and at less public expense when they are allowed to learn in their own natural ways.
Schools are needed to become the places of mental health and cognitive well being by making both learning environment and classroom processes pedagogically sound to make schools stress-free and happy places to learn.
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