A new study has found that extremes in water availability may increase rates of death by suicide among rural Indian adults. The study results add to a growing body of evidence from India and other countries that link environmental conditions such as drought, floods and extreme heat to mental health. 

Done jointly by researchers from US, Canada and India, the study uses data from rural Indian households largely dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. The researchers studied the links between water availability and deaths by suicides. They published their results in the journal of Environmental Research.

Results suggest that while deaths by suicide rose by 18.7% in extremely wet growing seasons, they rose by 3.6% in extremely dry growing seasons, when compared to seasons during which the rainfall was average.

“Our study indicates these extremes in water availability are associated with suicide in rural areas, so we might expect that the suicides as a result of water extremes could increase,” said Robin Richardson, a social epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health and the lead author of the study. 

Researchers analyzed 9,456 deaths by suicides of the total 249,789 deaths in the study population between 2001 and 2013.

They used data from the Million Death Study (MDS), an ongoing collaboration with India’s premier research agency – Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), among others.

“There are five authors of which four are based in North America (US & Canada) and one from India,” said Soumitra Pathare, director at the Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy, highlighting an ethical issue linked to the study. He drew attention to the fact that even though the data used was collected as a part of MDS, the ICMR was not acknowledged in the study.

The climate change link

Climate change is set to increase rainfall intensity in some areas and frequency of droughts in others, according to scientific evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations (UN) body set up to assess climate science. 

India is the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change, according to Global Climate Risk Index 2020 by Germanwatch, a Bonn-based development and environment organization. Other studies have established the changing rainfall patterns over large parts of India. 

“This [new study] may be grave considering that extreme rain events over India show a threefold rise during the recent decades,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune. “Climate models indicate that the frequency and intensity of heavy rains will continue into the future.”

This study also counters the popular narrative that droughts alone drive up rates of deaths by suicide, shining light on the detrimental impact of excessive rainfall that is often overlooked. “We found extremely wet conditions linked with a larger increase in suicides than extremely dry conditions, which was unexpected,” said Richardson.

A case for early warning systems

But it isn’t clear why or how extremely wet seasons are linked with larger increase in rates of death by suicide. This is one of the gaps researchers said would be worth exploring going forward. 

“The economic and property loss associated with floods is quite large,” said Koll, adding that the emerging studies make a case for early warning systems in flood-prone regions. 

The researchers also cautioned that the study was not without limitations and that it would be important for additional research studies to replicate these results. They also did not collect occupation information for this study but said that looking at links between death by suicides among farmers and water availability would be a good area of future research.

Suicide is a serious public health problem, however, they are preventable. If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273- 8255 or text TALK to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.