India, Sept. 27 -- Every time a student dies by suicide in India, our collective institutional response follows the same script. We express profound grief. Then, we swiftly promise to hire more campus counsellors. But counselling alone was never designed to solve a systems problem.

Hiring a handful of therapists on a university campus of 10,000 is the equivalent of placing a single fire extinguisher inside a burning building. If we want to genuinely protect the well-being of our youth, India has to look past ad-hoc emotional support and construct an integrated, resilient mental health infrastructure.

Our current approach to student wellness is fundamentally reactive. We routinely wait for a young person to reach a point of acute crisis ...