What QPR is
QPR stands for Question, Persuade, Refer. It is an emergency response to someone in a suicide crisis, taught to ordinary people rather than to clinicians — the same principle as teaching the public CPR.
The chain of survival
In cardiac care, survival depends on a chain: someone recognises what is happening, someone starts CPR, a defibrillator arrives, and paramedics take over. Break any link and the chain fails. QPR treats a suicide crisis the same way, and gatekeeper training is the first link.
The public is taught the classic signs of a heart attack — pressure in the chest, sweating, pain down the arm — and then taught what to do. QPR teaches the warning signs of a suicide crisis in the same plain way: hopelessness, talking about being a burden, giving away possessions, sudden calm after a long low period, seeking out means.
And then it teaches the response. Ask the question directly. Listen without arguing. Get the person to someone qualified. None of that requires a degree. It requires having been shown how, once.
Evidence and standing
QPR is not a new or untested idea. It has been studied, published and adopted by governments.
- Gatekeeper training is recommended by the World Health Organization as a suicide prevention intervention.
- QPR is named in the Government of India's National Suicide Prevention Strategy.
- The QPR Institute has trained gatekeeper instructors in more than a dozen countries since the 1990s, and the method is peer-reviewed.
What the research consistently shows is narrower than the marketing around gatekeeper training sometimes suggests: it reliably improves knowledge, confidence and willingness to intervene. Whether that translates into fewer deaths depends on what happens after the referral — whether there is anywhere to refer someone to. That is why we treat the referral route as part of the training rather than an afterthought.
Who we are
QPR Institute India is the India entity of the QPR Institute, a United States organisation founded in the 1990s. We licence and deliver QPR training across India, adapt it for Indian institutions, and certify Indian instructors so that programmes can be run locally rather than bought in repeatedly.
We are a for-profit social enterprise. Training is our revenue. We say that plainly because the alternative — implying we are a charity while charging for courses — is the kind of thing that erodes trust in this sector.
We work alongside the Suicide Prevention India Foundation, a Section-8 non-profit that runs free public awareness and community programmes. They are a separate organisation with separate funding.
The training itself takes about an hour
Most people are surprised by how short it is. That is the point — a method nobody has time for is a method nobody learns.