Two young students in Kota coaching centers died by suicide in 6 hours, on 27 August 2023. They added two to the count of suicides by the coaching class students in that city, making it 23 this year. 

As a practicing psychologist, I recently had a few frantic calls from a father, a lower rung government employee, whose daughter competed in a big entrance exam and bagged a seat in a top-class Indian institution for higher studies. She joined the institute and had to be brought back in a week’s time because she developed anxiety and panic attacks there as she just could not cope in the institute’s environment. I spoke to her. Most students in her institute came from the upper strata of the society or were brought up in the modern-day living environment that the millennials and beyond are used to. The institute’s environment contradicted a lot with her humble background. This broke her self-confidence and anxiety and panic attacks gripped her in just one or two days, crippling her mentally and emotionally.

Many of the students preparing for highly competitive examinations with the support of expensive and rigorous coaching classes like the ones in Kota (Rajasthan) fail to cope with the pressure, develop anxiety, lose self-confidence and end up feeling that they have reached a point of no return. When they slip into that kind of an extreme feeling, those who fail to find any source of mental and emotional support anywhere choose the saddest path of suicide as an escape route. My assessment of this conundrum broadly has the following contributing factors, even though they may not be applicable to all in their entirety and there could also be other contributing factors:

  1. Students with lesser capabilities to compete in the concerned examinations fail to realise their lower competence and choose to join Kota-type coaching classes leading to their underperformance and consequent disappointments.
  2. Overtly or covertly ambitious parents seeking to satisfy their own esteem needs, shaped by the family, relatives and acquaintances, push their children into situations of these kinds, even as they claim to have just their children’s   'bright' future in mind.
  3. The urge for  'success',  'achievement',  'competition', 'victory' etc. that our social beliefs drive into most of the people, make the parents, coaching class teachers and the students themselves send the students on a hopeless wild goose chase. The result often is deep disappointment for the victims who happen to be the students themselves.
  4. A huge chunk of students and youngsters these days lack basic life-skills because most of them grow up under over-providing parents who prevent them from getting exposed to common and natural problems of life and the skills to solve them. This leads to the collapse of the coping mechanism in the young ones.
  5. Many students may be academically brilliant. Yet they may be carrying unrecognised personality disorders that make them unfit for Kota-type coaching and even for the stream of study in the premier institution which they are yearning for.

In my assessment of the problem, the solutions need not come entirely from preventing the coaching classes from conducting frequent assessments and examinations or the kneejerk setting up of “counselling centers”. Instead, lasting results in terms of preventing further suicides in the coaching classes of Kota and elsewhere could come from some of the following:

  1. Before pushing students into situations like competitive examinations and coaching classes, get them assessed by professionals like psychologists and career counsellors.
  2. Parents need to understand the importance of building life skills into their children. WHO has prepared a comprehensive list of essential life skills which they need to comprehend and help in developing them in their children.
  3. Parents need to become aware of the dangers of nurturing esteem needs that they unconsciously try to fulfil through their children even when they tend to believe that what they are trying to push their children into was for their brighter future.
  4. Insist on the teachers, coaching programme designers and owners of the coaching classes undergoing training programmes on human behaviour and mental health management periodically. The coaching centers should also undergo mental health environment audits intermittently. This should include the quality of their internal mental health and counselling resources.
  5. The coaching classes should conduct independent psychological assessment of every student before granting admission.

Those who are not used to accepting mental wellbeing as the greatest “achievement” a human being can ever have will get a feeling that the suggestions made above are too utopian and not practical in a competitive and success-chasing living environment like ours. Such people, abundant in oursociety, are very likely to keep raising the bars of competition among the young ones, ignorant of the damages it can cause to them forever. And our society, which continues to view mental health issues other than full-fledged madness as non-existent, may not mind gulping down Kota-type suicides – be it 23 or 123 in a year, as just numbers.