“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving”. Albert Einstein wrote these words in a letter to his son as a piece of advice during a difficult phase of life. In essence, this message speaks of persistence, continuing forward despite setbacks, failures, and moments of self-doubt. This article, however, focuses on a far more troubling reality: moments when people stop moving altogether. Not as a pause, not as rest, but as the most final form of quitting, ending one’s life!
Unfortunately, every year, a growing number of people stop moving altogether, taking their own lives! While this could be a statistic in a newspaper for most of us, this is not just an abstract number for some of us. I have lived through this reality, as a classmate and as a childhood friend, watching someone young, brilliant, and full of promises stop moving one evening, without a warning or explanation.
Suicidal thoughts and behaviours are often rooted in an unregulated state of mind shaped by helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, and purposelessness. This inner struggle deepens, intensifies and sustains itself when individuals are unable to recognise, regulate, and work through their emotions, or lack adaptive coping skills. These abilities are not optional but essential life skills that must be intentionally developed.
The question official suicide numbers force us to confront is not only why individuals reach such breaking points but why our systems fail to equip them, early and systematically, with abilities to manage and regulate emotions and adaptive coping skills so that they keep moving, stay with life.
How Deep and Wide is the Problem in India?
When we step back from individual stories and look at the data, the scale of this crisis becomes impossible to ignore. India has the highest suicide rate in the world, with 12.3 incidents of suicide per one lakh population in 2023, against the global rate of under 10. Beyond the personal loss and devastated families, the nation carries an economic burden too. The annual economic burden of deaths by suicide in India is over 1.40 lakh crore (around USD 16 B), as estimated by ASAR (Association for Socially Applicable Research).
Deaths by suicide are not confined to any one age group, occupation, or gender group. It cuts across life stages. It strikes the most heavily during formative, building, striving, and contributing years. Two in three deaths by suicide are among adults between 18 and 45 years old. Adolescents, too, are not spared. One in 17 lives lost to suicide is someone below 18 years old, underscoring how early vulnerability can take root.
Education and employment, often assumed to be protective, offer no immunity. Students account for one in 12, or 8% of deaths by suicide, while professional and salaried individuals account for one in 10 deaths by suicide. Within this professional and salaried individuals’ segment, private sector employees account for nearly three out of four cases. These numbers quietly shatter a comforting myth that academic success, stable jobs, or professional status shield individuals from despair. They remind us of a deeper truth we rarely teach or internalise. In the words of Krishna Jambur, life skills coach, “we are not as good as our successes make us appear, and we are not as broken as our failures make us feel”.
The numbers reveal the scale of the crisis, but they do not explain its selective cruelty. Death by suicide is woven into the struggles of everyday life in schools and colleges, offices, homes, and communities. Millions are exposed to similar family structures and backgrounds, learning and working environments, social pressures, and life’s challenges. Yet why do only some reach that breaking point, feeling helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, and purposelessness and decide to quit, while others decide to stay strong, refuse to quit and stay with life?
Could Emotional Intelligence (EI) be the Missing Link?
What sets those who reach that breaking point apart from those who don’t, despite the same circumstance? The difference is rarely the absence of stress, failure, or pain. It lies in whether an individual has learned to understand what they are feeling, regulate emotional overwhelm, manage themselves through those emotions, and knows how to cope and seek support without fear or shame. When these abilities are missing, distress narrows the mind, emotions become unmanageable, and the future feels closed.
This is where the story moves beyond numbers into the inner terrain of EI, and why understanding the Emotional Intelligence suicide behaviour connection is no longer optional, but essential. Various individual research studies, as well as a meta-analysis of research studies, consistently identify Emotional Intelligence as a powerful protective factor against suicidal ideation and behaviour. Studies consistently show an inverse relationship between Emotional Intelligence and suicide behaviour.
A recent 2025 study involving a systematic review and meta-analysis of previous research studies concludes that individuals with a higher level of Emotional Intelligence would have better emotion regulation skills and coping mechanisms, as well as social support, which ultimately reduces susceptibility to suicide. A 2020 research study on adolescents reports that during adolescence, Emotional Intelligence is proven to be a protective factor against suicidal ideation and attempts. Adolescents with higher Emotional Intelligence tend to have adaptive coping skills, which, in turn, predict lower levels of suicidal ideation. Moreover, an Emotional Intelligence intervention program focused on adolescents was found to significantly decrease suicidal ideation and hopelessness, according to a 2020 research study
Evidence supports that Emotional Intelligence development among individuals, as early as the adolescent stage, prepares them to handle life’s challenges with clarity and confidence by developing emotional regulation and management abilities, adaptive coping skills, and resilience, which, in turn, lowers the suicide risk. So, developing EI at the early stage of life can be a sound suicide prevention strategy.
Suicide is a spontaneous reaction, a momentary decision, due to the inability to tolerate and manage pain and sorrow. Through EI development, the ability to tolerate, acknowledge, accept, and manage pain and sorrow can be developed. Learning how to maneuver through these painful emotions, one builds the capacity to accept failures as through exercises, one build muscles.
Dr. Padmashree,
Ph.D. (Emotional Intelligence), Emotions Coach.
Can Individuals be Taught or Trained to Become Emotionally Intelligent?
Emotional Intelligence is not always a fixed or inborn trait. While individuals differ in their biological starting points (neurological system), the core Emotional Intelligence capabilities, such as self-awareness, emotion regulation and adaptive coping skills, are learnable skills shaped and developed primarily through learning, practising, and experience. These skills are supported by brain networks that remain plastic across childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood, meaning they can be strengthened intentionally through education and structured interventions.
So, individuals need to be educated and need to catch them young, during the formative years, to develop Emotional Intelligence. This is precisely where education must expand its responsibility, from developing IQ and preparing individuals for employability to also intentionally developing Emotional Intelligence early, during the formative years, as a foundation for navigating life itself.
If Emotional Intelligence is learnable and is shaped through early and systematic education, then its absence is a systemic failure. This is the unfinished responsibility of education. It is evident that the current education system is preparing students to perform but not to endure; to compete but not to cope. While individuals are trained to solve and tackle professional problems and tasks, they are left ill-prepared to process failure, emotional distress, and internal conflicts.
The deeper question, then, is not how educated our students are, but how well our education system is preparing them for life beyond classrooms and careers: to tackle real-life challenges with clarity and confidence, to thrive in the larger life. Until education consciously and intentionally develops these Emotional Intelligence skills alongside IQ and prepares for employability, education remains incomplete; academically accomplished, yet emotionally unfinished. Incorporating Emotional Intelligence development into mainstream education, through structured, evidence-informed programs, is no longer optional but an essential preventive care to tackle deaths by suicide.
Why Educational Institutions?
If Emotional Intelligence is to be developed intentionally and systematically shaped by education, learning and practising, then educational institutions become the most critical leverage point in this whole equation. Educational institutions are among the few platforms that reach young individuals early, consistently, and at scale. For millions of young people, these institutions represent the earliest and most sustained social systems outside the family, spaces where habits are learned, reinforced, or neglected every single day. This positions educational institutions at the very centre of Emotional Intelligence development.
And therefore, these institutions are at the very heart of any serious and meaningful response to the deeper human crisis unfolding. Educational institutions must be seen not only as a place for IQ development and employment preparation, but also as a place to develop EI and for public health early-stage preventive intervention. The question for educators and policymakers is no longer whether this belongs in education, but how soon we choose to act.
Implications for Educational Institutions
Here are two high-leverage action points for educational institutions.
- Make EI a core learning outcome, not an add-on: Define emotional competencies as an explicit learning outcome, just like other academic or technical skills. Put a structured intervention in the form of a training and development program and measure the outcome. What gets named and measured gets attention.
- Equip the ecosystem with EI, not just students: EI development does not happen in isolation; the environment influences it. Parents, teachers, and other relevant stakeholders need basic emotional literacy and psychologically safe practices, like active and empathetic listening without judgment.
References +
- The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Preventing Suicidal Behaviours: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12009489/
- Effectiveness of Emotional Intelligence Therapy on Suicide Risk among Adolescents in Residential Care https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7288618
- Untangling the Emotional Intelligence-Suicidal Ideation Connection: The Role of Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies in Adolescents https://www.mdpi.com/2077- 0383/9/10/3116#B7-jcm-09-03116
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