Trigger warning: This article contains content about suicide and mental health issues
At 11:48 pm on November 10, an email landed in the inbox of the Uttar Pradesh Police’s Social Media Centre at the DGP headquarters in Lucknow. It contained a link to an Instagram video uploaded minutes earlier by a 22-year-old man from Firozabad.
In the video, the man swallowed camphor tablets. The caption, written in Hindi, read: “Let’s see if I’m alive by tomorrow morning. Ate something trusting God… now just waiting to die.”
The alert had been generated by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Its automated systems had flagged the post as suicide-related and forwarded it to the UP Police.
At Ramgarh police station of Firozabad district, SHO Sanjeev Dubey got the call. “We traced the location within five minutes,” Dubey said. It was two kilometres away.
By the time the police reached the house, the man was lying on his bed. His parents were stunned. They had no idea anything was wrong.
What happened next had no script and no training manual. Dubey sat down and asked the man: “Why do you want to die?”
The Alert System
Since 2022, Uttar Pradesh has been part of Meta's global suicide-prevention program. Posts on Facebook and Instagram that are flagged—by artificial intelligence systems or user reports—as potentially indicating self-harm are reviewed by Meta and, in high-risk cases, shared with law enforcement partners.
Between January 2023 and November 2025, the UP police say they acted on hundreds of such alerts and prevented 1,597 suicide attempts.
Meta does not publicly disclose how its models are trained across different languages, what error rates exist, or how escalation thresholds are determined. Researchers studying digital suicide-prevention tools have warned that while such systems can help identify risk, they often shift responsibility onto public institutions without corresponding investment in mental healthcare or long-term support.
In Uttar Pradesh, that burden falls on police officers who are required to become counsellors overnight.
The 22-year-old in Firozabad worked for a microfinance company issuing small loans. His job was to collect repayments. When people stopped paying, he felt trapped, responsible for money he could not recover, ashamed of his failure, and increasingly depressed.
“There is no SOP for counselling,” Dubey said. “You understand the situation and deal with it.”
Dubey spoke about life’s ups and downs. He warned gently about legal consequences. He tried motivation, telling the many stories of Indian women cricketers like Renuka Singh and Deepti Sharma, who struggled early in their careers. He asked the parents not to scold their son, and told them to stay close to him.
That night, the man survived.
India recorded over 180,000 suicide deaths in 2022, the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau. Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state, reported over 18,000 suicide deaths that year, among the highest nationally.
Mental-health infrastructure remains sparse. India has fewer than one psychiatrist per 100,000 people, which is far below the WHO's recommendations. District Mental Health Programmes exist on paper, but access is uneven, especially in rural areas.
Into this gap have stepped police officers armed with phone numbers, cell tower data, and whatever instincts they can muster.
“We usually get a phone number linked to the account,” said Rahul Srivastava, in-charge of the Social Media Centre and DGP PRO. From there, police trace the SIM registration, pull live location data using servers linked to the Special Task Force, and forward details to district police and Dial 112 (Uttar Pradesh police’s emergency number). Ideally, officers reach within 15 minutes.
“It’s a race against time,” Srivastava said.
Racing The Clock
On October 13, 2025, Meta flagged another Instagram video. This time from a 19-year-old boy in Unnao district. A noose was visible in the background.
Police received the alert at 8:35 pm.
Chowki Bhagwantnagar In-charge Devendra Kumar Awasthi reached the village within 16 minutes. But the location was vague, and no one recognised the boy. His phone number was registered under someone else’s name.
Awasthi showed villagers the video. With help from the village head, they finally identified the house.
The boy had already tied the noose. While searching for a phone charger, Awasthi noticed a bottle of poison hidden under the boy’s pillow.
“We intervened immediately and started counselling him,” Awasthi told Decode. The boy, he said, was distressed after a dispute with a girl he was in a relationship with. “These days, most cases are like this,” Awasthi said. “Relationship issues.”
The police told the boy about his own life struggles. He told the family not to leave him alone. The boy broke down and promised not to repeat it.
“He said we gave him a second life,” Awasthi said.
When asked if he had been trained in counselling, he shrugged. “After handling so many cases, we understand how to speak to someone in distress.”
Policing As Counselling
Across Uttar Pradesh, police officers are increasingly performing the role of first responders, crisis counsellors, and family mediators—often simultaneously, and almost always without formal mental health training.
“You learn from experience,” Dubey said.
In Etawah, SHO Sunil Kumar described rescuing a 23-year-old man who was walking on a railway track on the Delhi–Howrah route after posting online about ending his life. The man was preparing for competitive exams and struggling financially.
“We offered him water,” Sunil said. “He was very scared. We calmed him down.”
In Rae Bareli, officers rushed to a house after a 21-year-old woman posted a photo with capsules and a message apologising to her parents. Officers kept calling her phone while racing through traffic, afraid that silence meant something worse.
“In such moments, your mind runs fast,” said Rajiv Singh, then SHO of Mill Area police station. “What condition will she be in when we reach?”
A woman constable was sent to counsel the girl. The mother was asked to stay with her. Police checked back the next day, and quietly in the following days. “We don’t want to make the family uncomfortable,” Singh said. “But we keep a watch.”
But not every alert ends in a rescue. In Kanpur Dehat, police tracked down a college student who had posted a video with tablets on Instagram. When officers reached her, she denied any suicidal intent.
“She said she uploaded it only to gain views,” said SI Mohanveer.
Her phone had been switched off. Police had gone door to door, showing her photo, afraid they were already too late. “She didn’t even know the video was public,” said constable Rekha Bind. “We were shocked and annoyed.”
The police counselled her for over an hour. They explained the consequences: police visits, neighbourhood scrutiny, family distress.
False alarms, officers say, are emotionally and operationally costly but they still have to respond as if every case is real.
Meta does not publicly disclose state- or country-level data on false positives in suicide-risk alerts shared with law enforcement. Globally, the company has acknowledged that its systems may generate false positives and false negatives, particularly in cases involving sarcasm, performance, or ambiguous language.
In Uttar Pradesh, the burden of determining whether an alert represents real danger falls entirely on the police.
The Fragile System
Rahul Srivastava, who heads the UP Police Social Media Centre, says that in every case flagged so far, police reached in time. “Not a single case has resulted in a casualty before we arrived,” he said.
But the system relies on speed, instinct and improvisation. Officers trace SIM cards, break doors, sit on floors and say whatever they believe might keep someone alive.
Most alerts come late at night. “That’s when people feel most alone,” Srivastava said.
Meta’s technology may help identify distress, but what follows is human—often messy, inconsistent and fragile. Researchers have repeatedly warned that one-time interventions without sustained follow-up can leave people vulnerable to relapse.
The UP police acknowledge this gap. A tie-up with UNICEF to provide tele-counsellors is under discussion. “The police can rescue once,” Srivastava said. “But what if they try again after a month?” “We cannot expect them to open up the way they would with a psychiatrist,” said Jay Prakash Singh, superintendent of police in Unnao.
Psychiatrists involved in suicide prevention say police interventions can be effective—but only within limits.
“Community resources absolutely have a role to play,” said Prof Samir Parikh, a psychiatrist who has collaborated with Meta on its self-injury crisis support feature in India. “Teachers, police personnel, ASHA workers—all of them can be part of the first line of response.”
Parikh described these encounters as psychological first aid, not counselling. “It’s about identifying who is struggling, responding in an empathetic, non-judgmental way, listening, and then linking them to solutions,” he said. “But this is not therapy. These are two very different things.”
Psychological first aid can stabilise a crisis, Parikh said, but only if systems exist for follow-up care. “Once this has happened, people who need expert help must be able to reach it.”
Meta says its suicide-prevention system uses machine learning to analyse words, context, timing and engagement patterns in posts. Early systems flagged too many harmless posts because risky language is often used casually. According to the company, newer models are trained on posts that were reported but later confirmed not to be suicidal, helping the system better understand context. All flagged posts are reviewed by human teams before escalation.
Meta does not disclose how well these systems perform across Indian languages or regions.
For now, suicide prevention in Uttar Pradesh looks like police officers leaving their desks at 2am, guided by partial data and phone pings, entering homes where parents are asleep and children are unraveling.
“Our job runs 24 hours,” Sunil Kumar said. “Sometimes we fall sick too.”
If this story brings up difficult feelings, help is available:
Tele-MANAS (Govt of India): 14416 or 1-800-891-4416 (24/7)
KIRAN Mental Health Helpline: 1800-599-0019 (24/7)
AASRA: +91-22-27546669 (24/7)
iCALL (TISS): 9152987821 (Mon–Sat, 8am–10pm)
Vandrevala Foundation: 9999 666 555 (24/7)
This story has been edited by Adrija Bose