Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Indian doctor kills self after parents reject British fiancee

By Indo Asian News Service | IANS India Private Limited – 18 hours ago

London, Dec 17 (IANS) A heartbroken India-born doctor in Britain committed suicide after his parents, citing cultural differences, disapproved of his wish to marry a fellow physician.

Anaesthetist Madhu Honnaiah, 33, from a hospital in Swansea, a coastal city in Wales, where he worked after splitting with fiancee Emma Wrighton, swallowed drugs, Daily Mail reported.

An inquest heard that Honnaiah's parents, from Karnataka's Bangalore city, had objected to his engagement to British-born Wrighton, 32, who had refused to have a Hindu wedding.
Honnaiah had begun a relationship with fellow doctor Wrighton in 2008 while working in Liverpool. She later got a job in Australia but they stayed in touch and moved in together after she returned to Britain. The two doctors got engaged in 2010. But he did not inform about it to his parents.
He was wary of telling his parents about the relationship due to their cultural beliefs, investigating officer PC Huw Evans told the inquest.
"During a visit to Britain from India, his parents learned of the relationship and said they weren't happy about it. It was said his parents wanted him to marry someone from his caste or from the Bangalore area of India where he grew up," Evans said.
Honnaiah was alone when he injected himself with two drugs used in surgery seven months after their split.
"After the breakdown of his relationship, concerns about Dr Honnaiah's state of mind were raised by his colleagues," Evans said.

An eight-page hand written letter made it clear that Honnaiah intended to take his own life.

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Suicide, murder: Love saga turns bloody

By Indo Asian News Service | IANS India Private Limited – Wed 12 Dec, 2012

Alappuzha (Kerala), Dec 12 (IANS) After a Class 12 girl committed suicide in Punnapara near here following her parents' objections to her affair with a man, her father hacked her lover's mother to death Wednesday, police said.

After being reprimanded by her father for her affair, the girl hanged herself Wednesday morning. Her paramour, who is in his mid-20s, works at a shop.

Haridas, the girl's father, went to the man's house and hacked his 52-year-old mother to death.

"Haridas has been taken into custody," police said. Haridas works in an aluminium factory here.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

New Aasra write-up in The Khaleej Times Weekend Magazine

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/wknd/wknd_article.asp?xfile=/data/wkndtopstories/2012/December/wkndtopstories_December1.xml&section=wkndtopstories

THE MIDDLEMEN

Finding middle ground

Karen Ann Monsy

Friday, December 07, 2012

Not everyone knows to deal with conflicts or crises very well. They happen all the time, some with higher stakes than others, but the rules for negotiating them remain pretty much the same
Not everyone knows to deal with conflicts or crises very well. They happen all the time, some with higher stakes than others, but the rules for negotiating them remain pretty much the same
When faced with a critical situation, the immediate human reaction can go either one of two ways: they may act quickly, calmly and effectively — or they may demonstrate what someone who’s ‘lost it’ looks like in person.
Crises come in many forms, the more serious ones ranging from hostage situations and life-threatening emergencies to boardroom battles and marital splits. While many would gladly opt to stay well away from conflict (in any of its forms, whether their own or others’), there are a few crisis negotiators who regularly take on the mantle of walking that fine middle line in the hopes of finding a favourable resolution to all. We speak to a few folks who have learned to battle the high stakes and still play it cool.

“Don’t be a hostage”
It’s true that extreme circumstances may sometimes be the best way to confront one’s true potential. American citizen George Kohlrieser certainly discovered his the first time he got taken hostage. The experience was traumatic but it paved the way for a career as a clinical psychologist that includes 35 years as a hostage negotiator. His story of how that came to be is far more personal than most and, as you may have guessed, a little extreme.

FORGING BONDS: George Kohlrieser warns we can be taken hostage without weapons, if not careful
He’d signed up to participate in a domestic violence protection programme right after grad school, and on one of the days when he was driving around with the police, they got a distress call from a local hospital, where a “psychotic man was holding a nurse hostage”. A quick assessment of the situation told the lieutenant in charge there was only one option: someone had to go in. “To my surprise, it was me he asked,” George narrates. “But I agreed and went in. The man wasn’t happy to see me and, within a few minutes, had cut the nurse’s throat (though not her jugular).”
He quickly took George hostage with a pair of scissors at his throat. But after an extended negotiation of about 20-30 minutes, George had managed to convince him to give up the nurse, the scissors — and himself. He puts it down to the emotional bond he managed to form with his captor: “At one point, I’d asked him how he wanted his children to remember him. With rage, he shouted: “Don’t talk about my kids. In fact, get them here; I’ll kill them too!” It wasn’t a rational answer but it was an answer to my question — the first one. In fact, he did love his kids. We later learnt the whole scene was a result of getting into a fight with his ex-wife after he broke a court order to see the kids.”
George got taken hostage three more times after this (these things happen) but it was the first incident that changed his life for good. Currently a professor of Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at reputed business school IMD in Switzerland, the 67-year-old is not involved in direct hostage negotiation today but teaches many of the same negotiation techniques as applicable to everyday living. “The fact is you can be a hostage without weapons — to a boss, to ideas, to children, spouses, in-laws etc,” he states. “But the same techniques we use in hostage negotiation can be used in those situations where you’re psychologically held hostage, powerless or entrapped.”
He encourages building bridges but draws the line at being taken hostage. “Learn to say no without offending the other person. Learn to tolerate conflict and talk your way through the differences. A hostage negotiator’s best tool is not a gun — but his words and how they’re used. You must be master of your own fate.”

Corporate techniques
Crises are nothing new to Washington-based Christopher Voss, whose cool negotiation style caused some colleagues to dub it as “very Zen” during his seven-year tenure as lead kidnapping negotiator at the FBI. The former special agent spent a total of 24 years in the agency’s service and worked in excess of 150 kidnapping cases while there, but it was the botched rescue attempt of the 2001 Burnham-Sobero case (American missionaries and citizen who’d been kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf group) that made him step back and change his entire outlook on things.

ACE NEGOTIATOR: Christopher Voss has adapted several techniques they used in hostage crises for the corporate world
“It was the first time I’d worked a case where people got killed, especially when we thought they were going to be released towards the end. It was probably the worst professional moment in my career and a pretty low point in my personal life too when I got called in the morning and got told that Martin Burnham had been killed. That’s when I wanted to understand the dynamics of what had happened. I vowed to myself I’d never let that happen again.”
Christopher ended up on the Harvard Law School negotiation course, where he rediscovered techniques they’d “already known but whose power they didn’t entirely realise”. He left the FBI in 2007 and eventually opened his own firm of negotiation experts called The Black Swan Group that has adapted crisis negotiation techniques for the business world. In other words, he posits that several techniques learned on the front lines of negotiation in international kidnapping crises can go a long way to making or breaking deals in the corporate world — if you know to use them.
For example, most people go into a negotiation looking to ‘win’. “That’s short term thinking,” he contends. “You can cut someone’s throat in a bargain and win every last dollar on the table but those people are never going to want to talk to you again. What’s more, your reputation precedes you so no one will make good deals with you. No one complains about doing business with Warren Buffet because those who do prosper. That’s the sort of negotiator you want to be.”
While there are many qualities to a good negotiator, Christopher, who is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business today, considers integrity paramount to success. “First off, most people that take hostages are generally really good liars anyway,” he says. Likewise, even in the corporate world, the consultant says some of the best businessmen he knows often ask their counterparts set-up questions to begin with so they know clearly later on when they’re being lied to. And that would just be a deal-breaker.

Help on the line
When Mumbai-based Johnson Thomas received a call a few months back from a compatriot in Milan threatening suicide by poison, the 37-year-old coolly allowed the distressed caller to vent his frustrations till eventually, he calmed down, listened as Johnson reasoned with him and, finally, ended the call after promising to get in touch if he felt unable to handle the pressure again. Random, you say? Not at all. That call was just one of over three lakh calls that Johnson’s 24-hour suicide prevention hotline Aasra has received over the last 14 years. Well, 3,15,434 calls as of last week, to be unnervingly precise.

PATIENT LISTENER: Johnson Thomas helped found Aasra as a suicide prevention hotline in 1998
A freelance journalist and film critic by profession, Johnson founded the helpline in 1998 after one of his students from the orphanage he taught at after college in those days committed suicide. “I met a lot of kids who were disturbed, distressed and suicidal there,” he recalls. “But maybe if I’d paid a little more attention to that student, he might still be alive today.” The tragedy spurred him to contact international charity Befrienders Worldwide/Samaritans, and together with some like-minded individuals, Aasra was born.
The number of callers has jumped greatly since the service first began. But years on, he admits you still never know what you’re going to get with a caller today. They range from as young as 10-year-olds wanting to take their lives to 75-year-olds too weary to go on. No matter what their profile, each caller gets a patient, listening ear – the oldest, most effective disarming technique to date. “We’ve learned they don’t really want to end their lives… just somehow kill the pain they’re experiencing. So we provide complete emotional support and aim to lower their tensions to the point where we can get them to think of options other than suicide.”
It’s not a job for everyone, Johnson concedes. “You need to have the innate ability to empathise with these callers because if you can’t, you won’t be able to adapt to the repertoire [of distressed callers and their issues]. The idea is to stay calm and allow them to express themselves without judgement or criticism.” And that works across the board — whether you’re a parent, sibling or friend.

When love has lost…
The honeymoon period is over and the strains are starting to show. At times, it’s on decades of marital… togetherness that the curtains are set to close. It’s when the legal route is inevitable that family law solicitor Alexandra Tribe steps in to mediate the process.

MEDIATOR: When things go sour in a marriage, Alexandra Tribe steps in to ease the legal process
The 36-year-old Briton, who trained as a resolution accredited specialist before moving to Dubai in 2007 and establishing the Expatriate Law division at Al Rowaad Advocates, says her first advice to feuding couples is always to reconsider. “Since I’ve been in Dubai, I’ve probably divorced about 300 expats, about 20-30 per cent of which end up in court,” she notes. “The remaining are dealt with amicably through negotiations so that a court decision isn’t required.”
If the couple insist on calling it quits, the negotiations — so integral to keep things from turning ugly — begin. “It’s very common, when parties separate, for emotions to run high. They often don’t want to speak to each other so that’s where I get involved, negotiating so that the transition is smooth, especially if there are children involved.” The division of financial and marital assets are one thing, but Alexandra finds there’s often a lot of anxiety about what will happen with the kids. “If an agreement about the children is reached early on, other financial compromises tend to be easier to sort.”
Quarrels can get petty and trivial, with both parties using their solicitors to trade stingers. But that is a game Alexandra is not too keen to play. “I have to remind them to take a step back and focus on the important issues otherwise costs will unnecessarily escalate and there’ll be more hostility between the two,” she explains. “I often find the husband/wife want to use me as a voice for their anger, which is inappropriate since I’m there to resolve the problem...”
With so much hostility to deal with every day, it’s only inevitable for things to get to the professional at times as well. “Clients are understandably upset and emotional when they come to see me, and I always have a box of tissues on my desk. It’s quite hard but I see my job as resolving the problem so I try not to get too swept up in the happenings and focus on reaching a good outcome for them as soon as possible so they can move on with their lives.”

Facing the fire
A fire fighter by profession for the last 17 years, Fujairah-based Pieter Smit says he is “in negotiations” all the time. From trying to convince an old South African lady to leave the house that was burning down around her (“it was all she had left”) to coaxing trapped cats out of elevator shafts and poisonous snakes out of residences (“we negotiate with animals too”), the South African national has probably done it all.

TO THE RESCUE: Pieter Smit (left) with fellowfire fighters during a water rescue training session in Saudi Arabia
The 36-year-old first started as a volunteer at school before landing a permanent position at the local fire department then moving on to work with the UN mission in Congo and the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Currently the lead fire fighter at oil and gas company ADCO, Pieter says negotiation skills are critical in his line of work because “firemen usually find people at their worst — when their property has been destroyed or family members are in grave danger… Everything is chaos and nobody’s thinking straight.”
Some of the most trying situations, however, involve crowd control more than search-and-rescue, he feels. “People want you to help them but in some situations, it’s just too dangerous. Sometimes, a building may be in danger of collapse and you have to remove all the emergency workers from the area. The public doesn’t always understand why the fire fighters are, at that stage, standing back and doing nothing.” Though he and his team try to explain the situation calmly to those distraught, Pieter admits they often bear the brunt of a lot of fiery tempers too. “You have to be patient with them,” he reasons. “It comes with a fireman’s temperament. That’s why I always say: firemen are born, not made.”
Of all the negotiations he’s been part of, perhaps none were as interesting as when there were cultural mores to consider during those perilous operations as well. Take the 2009 Jeddah floods, he says. The country’s worst floods raged almost two metres high, destroying many homes and sweeping away thousands of vehicles. “There we were trying to get people out of houses but all the women had locked themselves up inside. Due to the local custom, they couldn’t speak to us either.” How did they manage? “Very carefully!” he laughs. “Thankfully, the security guards helped us explain... You still had to wait for them to put theiron — but times like these, you just go with the flow!”
Everyone deals with some form of crisis everyday. The point is, whether in the bedroom, the boardroom or the courtroom, neither aggression nor non-resistance will help. It’s all about finding middle ground.

karen@khaleejtimes.com

Friday, December 7, 2012

Write-up on Aasra in the BBC

4 December 2012 Last updated at 14:50 GMT

Shantanu Negi's Facebook suicide prompts shock in India

By Shalini Joshi Dehradun

Shantanu Negi's friends initially believed his Facebook post to be a joke

An Indian student has killed himself after posting a Facebook suicide note.

"Bye everyone... I will miss you... I quit," wrote Shantanu Negi, 16. Police think he was worried about an exam.
His friends initially believed it to be a joke, with many "liking" his last post and others commenting on it before they found out what happened.
Counsellors working with the social media site to improve reporting and support say many such cases in India are referred but few result in death.
Shantanu's death occurred at home in the northern town of Dehradun on Monday evening.
Within hours, as the news of the suicide spread, his shocked friends started writing condolence messages.
"Shantanu killed himself because he was worried that he won't do well in his mathematics examination," police officer Dinesh Singh Bhandari told the BBC.
A student of class 11 in the prestigious Asian School, Shantanu was a good student who had scored 90% marks in his class 10 examinations.
"Recently, he seemed to have lost interest in studies. We had talked to him about it, but there was no pressure on him," his father Pushkar Negi said.
From his Facebook profile, Shantanu appeared to be like any other happy and carefree teenager and his school said there had never been any complaints about him.
Helpline Last year, Facebook launched a system to allow users in India and elsewhere to report friends who they think may be contemplating suicide.
In India, the social networking site added the Mumbai-based Aasra suicide prevention helpline - part of the Befrienders Worldwide/Samaritans network - as part of its suicide risk alert system.
Johnson Thomas of Aasra told the BBC that in the past year they had intervened in more than 300 cases forwarded to them by Facebook.
Once a case has been flagged by worried friends, trained counsellors from the helpline email users offering to help them.
"We tell them we are worried and concerned about them. We cannot invade their privacy, but we request them to call us," Mr Thomas said.
"Very often they do and we talk them out of it. Some just stop posting such messages because they realise they have friends who care for them."
Mr Thomas says Shantanu "needed reassurance that not performing well in one exam is not a reason to kill himself. We all need people around us to support us."

More on This Story

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

International Volunteer Day- Dec 5th

Today, December 5th is International Volunteer Day (IVD) - an international observance designated by the United Nations since 1985.
Aasra thanks all it's volunteers both known and unknown for their unstinting efforts to brink the organization and it's avowed aim of Suicide Prfevention to the forefront of public consciousness. Your contributions have been integral for our success. Thank You all you lovely people. Keep up yhe good work as we have many more miles to go...

Monday, November 19, 2012

invite to 'Healing the Pain' prog tues 20th Nov 2012

Survey among CFTI's reveals that over the last two years 12 students committed suicide and 18 others attempted it .

Survey among CFTI's reveals that over the last two years 12 students committed suicide and 18 others attempted it .

CHENNAI: All central government funded technical institutions (CFTIs) in the country, including the IITs, IIMs and NITs, have been advised to set aside Rs 50 lakh a year to provide counselling services and conduct activities to ensure the mental health of their students.

A task force, constituted by the ministry of human resource development to study the increasing occurrences of suicides among students enrolled at the IITs and other such campuses in the country, made the recommendation to Union human resources development minister Pallam Raju and minister of state Shas hi Tharoor earlier this week.

The task force, headed by professor M Anandakrishnan, designed a questionnaire for the CFTIs to assess the existing mental health needs, understand the magnitude of the problem and ascertain the resources. Of the 86 CFTIs asked to fill the questionnaire, only 26 responded. Of this, more than half do not have a full time counsellor and only 10 have scope for students to self-declare mental health problems.

Pallam Raju suggested that the counselling services could be made a component in the accreditation process and that special weightage be given to the provision.

The task force has suggested that the government set up an empowered committee on the lines of the Raghavan committee on ragging "as it cannot be assumed that they will be followed by all CFTIs with the same degree of rigour and seriousness".

The survey revealed that over the last two years 12 students committed suicide and 18 others attempted it. As many as 872 students have been referred for counselling in these institutions. Relationship issues, personal problems, mental stress and family problems were reported as reasons for the suicides.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Set-aside-50-lakh-a-year-to-prevent-suicides-IITs-told/articleshow/17261769.cms?

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Amazing prescription for Depression

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Many years ago, Dr. A. J. Cronin occasionally prescribed an unusual treatment for some of his patients who were feeling "blue," "down," or generally blah. He would insist that for six weeks the patient say, "Thank you" for every kindness and keep a record of it. According to Dr. Cronin, he had a remarkable cure rate.

If you find yourself depressed, please consult your medical doctor. But everyone gets down at times, and sharpening your sense of gratitude can make an important difference in the way you feel. I have observed again and again that people's day-to-day happiness is not usually found in getting what they want; it comes from appreciating what they have, no matter how little.

Writer Arthur Gordon* used to tell about asking a physician friend of his for the name of the most effective prescription he knew.

"Well, I'll tell you," his friend said. "A colleague of mine once had a woman patient who suffered from depression. Got to the point where she stayed at home all the time, listless, apathetic, indifferent to just about everything. The usual medications didn't seem to help."

One day this doctor delivered a small pack-age to the woman's home. "I want you to take what's in this package," he said, "and spend ten minutes of every day looking through it at some object in this room."

In the package there was a strong magnifying glass. The woman faithfully took the prescription. She began looking through the lens at the warp and woof of the fabric on her sofa. She was amazed at what she saw. Then she examined the veins in a flower plucked from her garden, the color dots in an old photograph, and even the texture of her own skin. In days before close-up photography, she'd never seen the likes of it before. She was amazed and astounded at the brand new world opening up before her eyes.

Perhaps the doctor knew what Abraham Heschel put so well: "The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living." As this woman gazed at her world through a magnifying lens, she saw, in a completely different way, what had been around her all along.

Her sense of wonder gave way to another, more powerful emotion. The physician said that her experience with the lens, more than anything else, was the turning point of her illness. She began to get well because this unusual prescription had aroused within her the most curative of all emotions – gratitude.

Do you practice gratitude? I think you'll discover that it is no less than a powerful prescription for peace.

courtesy :LifeSupport

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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Indian doctor kills self after parents reject British fiancee

Indian doctor kills self after parents reject British fiancee

Suicide, murder: Love saga turns bloody

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

New Aasra write-up in The Khaleej Times Weekend Magazine