Every year, hundreds of thousands of people in South Asia deliberately harm themselves, yet researchers have almost no reliable data on why or how to prevent it. This project builds a research network across India and Pakistan to fill that gap. The problem is stark: self-harm is a leading cause of death in the region, but political instability, weak health systems, and a thin spread of senior researchers mean that even basic questions—who is most at risk, what triggers an episode, what local responses work—remain unanswered. The team will train a new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in culturally appropriate methods, while simultaneously running three core studies: a household survey, a stakeholder analysis, and a register of self-harm cases. If successful, the work will produce the first robust, comparable evidence on deliberate self-harm in South Asia. That evidence could reshape how community health workers, primary-care clinics, and public health officials respond to self-harm and suicide—shifting from guesswork to data-driven prevention policies. The project also explicitly documents how to build research capacity in fragile settings, offering a blueprint for other low- and middle-income countries facing similar knowledge gaps.
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Our vision is to bring together a critical mass of international expertise and research excellence to build capability and capacity to conduct research on Deliberate Self Harm (DSH). Our main aim is to produce new and robust information to inform the understanding of the nature of DSH in the context of profound social, political and economic challenges in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) such as India and Pakistan. Research leaders are thinly spread in LMICs, which limits capability building and restricts capacity. There are serious gaps in knowledge about DSH in South Asia. We will meet these challenges in two ways: - firstly by conducting research - secondly by providing training. Research that is collaboratively designed, culturally appropriate and rigorously implemented is one of the best learning tools for building capability. A trained and skilled workforce will continue to build capability and capacity for research. In this partnership, capability building is reciprocal and sustainable. We will share knowledge across the partnership. The programme of work will include training in different areas such as research methods, systematic reviews, data analysis and research governance. PhD students will benefit from the training. We will design some of the training ourselves and bring in other experts to help. We will draw on the expertise of people with lived experience to develop our work programme. A lot of different academic disciplines are involved in the programme. We will work together and share our knowledge to support post doctoral researchers and PhD students who will become the research leaders of the future. Our research programme will develop new evidence and strengthen our understanding of DSH. We will carry out research using quantitative and qualitative methods. We will develop a flexible and trained research workforce in India and Pakistan to carry out fieldwork safely, efficiently and rigorously in challenging environments. We will work closely with Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) partners in Pakistan and India. We will share our findings widely with a range of stakeholders including the local community, international forums and in high impact scientific journals. Our work will inform the development of culturally relevant community and primary-care responses to DSH and suicide in LMIC. Our work will also inform the development of suicide prevention policies, including public health messages and measures. We will document and evaluate the development of the partnership and knowledge exchange processes, and disseminate the findings on conducting this work. Our three core datasets (household survey sample, stakeholder sample, and DSH Register) will help us to examine and describe DSH in local context, explore substantive areas of interest in rich detail, answer a number of research questions and inform policy development and community and health service responses. We will find out more about differences and similarities between India and Pakistan and the differences and similarities between South Asia and other regions of the world.
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