2023-09-10 02:05:55
Pilar, mother of Virginia de la Calle, a 37-year-old web designer and tattoo artist, took her own life on September 1, 2020 at the age of 61 following “deteriorating since the pandemic began.” Shocked by “seeing on the news how people were dying and not being able to leave the house,” Pilar suffered in three months “a deterioration that I have not seen in my life”: “She was not there. We took her to the emergency room. She expressed her wishes to die in a notebook that we took to her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said ‘how negative everything’, sent her home and never contacted us once more,” recalls Virginia, founder along with “other survivors” of Stop Suicidios, from her home in El Escorial, a beautiful town in the Sierra de Madrid where “nature helps me overcome it following having strong autolytic ideas (thoughts of self-harm or suicide) that started following losing my mother.”
After 30 years diagnosed with bipolar disorder “without suffering a single crisis,” Pilar’s mediation was changed following her family raised the alarm to the doctors in the emergency room. «The new medication did not help her. She was completely gone. At no time was she admitted to it nor were we informed of the risk of suicide. Although Virginia and her father were not informed that her mother was a person at serious risk of taking her own life, “she was so bad that my father was watching her 24 hours a day, he became a police officer to try to prevent it from happening to her.” nothing bad”.
Together with 37 platforms, Stop Suicidios will demand this Sunday at the march “a National Suicide Prevention Plan”
Together with 37 platforms, Stop Suicidios demands this Sunday in a demonstration in Madrid to commemorate World Suicide Prevention Day, which will begin at 12:00 noon in Plaza Murillo, “a National Suicide Prevention Plan” following that 4,097 people took their lives last year in Spain, according to provisional data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). These 4,097 suicides, 84 of them under 20 years of age, make 2022 the year with the most suicides recorded in Spain, surpassing the record figures of 2021, with 4,003 cases, and 2020 when 3,941 people took their lives.
“We have had record numbers of suicides in Spain for three years in a row, but the administrations do not implement the necessary measures to improve health care for people with mental health problems,” Virginia laments. «Two years ago we managed to create the 024 telephone number to assist people at risk of taking their own lives. It is useful for some cases and extreme situations, but they cannot refer callers to specialists because there are not enough professionals in public health,” explains the founder of Stop Suicides.
After the first appointment with the psychiatrist, “it takes weeks or months to give the second appointment” to people at risk of suicide, Virginia says regarding the lack of professionals. In the petition on Charge.org created by the member of Stop Suicidios, Román Reyes, in November 2019 following the suicide of his mother, they demand “an urgent solution from the Ministry of Health”: “We need more resources so that people who They are at risk of suicide, do not send them home and remain hospitalized as long as necessary. “More psychologists in public health, specialized emergency services and more training in suicide prevention, both for health workers and state security forces, as well as for the families who live with the patients,” she reads in This petition has more than 431,600 signatures.
Virginia emphasizes that “we are outside of the 40 countries that do have a national prevention plan, such as the United States, Germany, Ireland or Denmark”: “We are leaving the work done to the Ministry of Health so that they can develop a plan from there. “People at risk of suicide are not cared for.”
After 11 people a day committed suicide in Spain in 2022, Teresa Ribalta, a 53-year-old psychologist and director of the Orienta Foundation dedicated to the mental health of children and adolescents, emphasizes that “those who take their own lives are not mentally ill.” : “In life there are difficult situations and we can all find ourselves overcome at some point.”
«The pills make the problem chronic. “Patients need to be heard.”
Spain is the second country in the world that consumes the most anxiolytics and antidepressants with 111 million packages sold in 2022, 30% more than a decade ago, only surpassed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, notes the latest report from the International Narcotics Control Board. . 9.7% of the Spanish population had consumed sedative-hypnotics with or without a prescription in the last 30 days, while 7.2% of the population admitted consuming these drugs daily.
Ribalta explains that these pills “should not be the first option”: “There is a harmful overconsumption of psychotropic drugs in a good percentage of cases.” Despite being “useful in some circumstances, they do not resolve what the emotion is communicating to us, that we must make changes, act differently”: “Then the pills make the problem chronic. “Patients need to be listened to, but there is a lack of professionals.”
Virginia responds to the messages that arrive on the Stop Suicides Instagram account that reflect “the lack of attention to patients”: “They write to us: ‘I tried to commit suicide this morning and they gave me an appointment for 2025.’ ‘That night I took several bottles of pills. I went to the emergency room and they discharged me this morning.’ This is the reality, not what politicians say that everything possible is being done. The founder of Stop Suicidios asks the Government to “collect our demands to arrive on time in all cases”: “Being assisted should not depend on the autonomous community where you live.” When she was at her worst, Virginia did not look for a psychologist in public health “because she knew there were none”: “I went to a private psychologist, I refused to take pills because I had seen their negative effects and, with therapy and time, I am fine now” .
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