Seerat Farooqi, a second year student of the General Nurse Midwife (GNM) School at the Nalanda Medical College, allegedly committed suicide in her hostel room on Friday morning. Police sources said they had not received any suicide note from the spot.

Hostel inmates at the GNM nursing school found the nursing student's body hanging from the grill of the window in her hostel room.

According to hostel inmates, Seerat had gone into depression soon after returning from her home in Begusarai after Bakr-Id on September 5.

'Seerat had suddenly gone into seclusion prior to taking the extreme step,' said a student of the college. 'She was sending more time alone in her hostel room once college was over and she was done with providing service at the hospital. Also, she was not taking regular meals and had stopped talking to the others. I was thinking of raising the matter with her. I did not know that she would take such an extreme step.'

Geeta Shah, principal of the nursing college, however, said she had no idea why Sirat allegedly attempted to suicide.

'She was attending classes at the school, besides doing her duty at the hospital,' Geeta said. 'We didn't find anything abnormal in her behavior. We are shocked. This is the first such incident in our nursing school.'

The nursing college students found Seerat's body in her room around 8am. The police arrived at the scene an hour later. Alamganj police station house officer (SHO) Om Prakash said: 'The girl went to sleep after dinner on Thursday night. Her friends found her body in the morning.'

Police sources said when Seerat did not open the door to her room in the morning, her friends informed the security guard who broke the door open to find her hanging from the upper grill of her room's window.

'The girl hails from Teghra in Begusarai,' SHO Prakash said. Her father Mohammed Ayub had passed away a few years back. The girl had gone to her village in Begusarai for Bakr-Id.

The SHO said the girl's mother was visiting her elder daughter's house and the police would question her to ascertain the possible reason behind Sirat's death.

After conducting post mortem on the body, the Alamganj police handed it over to Seerat's family members.

Last year in December, a nursing student from Kurji Holy Family College of Nursing, had allegedly committed suicide in her classroom.

Neha Kumari, 21, was a first year bachelor's degree student of nursing and was living at the institute's hostel within the premises.

Psychologists say that there has been a spurt in suicidal tendencies among people of all age groups. 'Be it teenagers, the middle-aged or the elderly, there has been a dip in tolerance levels in every age group,' said Binda Singh, a clinical psychologist.

'Earlier, people would tolerate things but nowadays nobody wants to tolerate anything. No one has the patience, strangely not even people in the higher age group. So, when people with lesser tolerance level face problems, they tend to lose their confidence and go into depression easily. Family members can help people with suicidal tendencies but it has been seen that only those people who don't get emotional support from their families attempt suicide. Today, I received a case of a Class 9 student who had attempted suicide twice. When I spoke to the girl in private, she said that her parents used to be suspicious of her whenever she spoke to a male friend. They would even call up the parents of her male classmates in this regard, making her feel bad. Had the family members communicated to the girl in a better manner, her suicide bid could have been averted.'

Throwing more light on the likely reasons for the girl's suicide, Binda said: 'Being a nursing student, it is likely she was scolded by her superiors, perhaps for not having done her job well, though it is possible she was tense for wholly different reasons. The moment she began living in seclusion, people should have taken it as a sign that something was serious and should have tried to talk to her. This could have helped save her life.'