[Encourage yourself; encourage others.]
This is Roberto, 50 years old, the funniest man I have ever met.
He always joked and made others laugh.
He had a great sense of humor
and everyone loved him because of his generosity.
This is Luisa, 23 years old,
a beautiful and extroverted young lady
who was always with her friends and tried to enjoy every moment.
She was the type of girlfriend you want,
because she made you feel more alive.
And this is Alex, only 13 years old, just a teenager.
He loved reading and when he was an adult,
he wanted to be an architect and live in Brazil.
And this is Carmen.
[Carmen sings in Spanish]
Carmen, 48 years old,
a wonderful woman who loved life
and treated everyone tenderly and kindly.
What do you think these four have in common?
They can be family, friends, neighbors.
From the perspective of society
Carmen had everything a woman could ask for:
she had a family who loved her, four healthy children and a good job.
What else could she wish for?
She was a real role model,
but no one knew she was fighting
against a major depression and a personality disorder
who brought about an unbearable suffering in her.
Although she had sustained that hard fight for many years,
Carmen committed suicide.
Carmen is my wonderful mother, who committed suicide when she was 48.
If you watch this video, would you say she was depressed?
Would you have expected her to have a personality disorder?
Would you believe me if I told you
that this was only filmed a few months before she committed suicide?
That is what all these people have in common.
Roberto, Luisa, Alex and my mother committed suicide.
Roberto suffered from depression,
Luisa had a personality disorder,
Alex was bullied
and my mother had a depression and a personality disorder.
Statistically, one in four suffers from a mental disorder.
That is to say: if you are not, then it is someone next to you.
More than a million people commit suicide every year.
Every 40 seconds someone commits suicide.
Think of Alex – barely 13.
You have to think:
“How strange, he was too young to do such a thing.”
Well, suicide is the biggest cause of death among teenagers today.
You may have thought that it was car accidents –
that is what I thought —
but the suicide rate is more than twice as high
as the number of deaths from car accidents.
For every case of sex-related violence, there are 72 suicides.
And from everyone who commits suicide,
95% had a mental disorder,
100% avoidable.
I bet that you did not know all that.
Because this is Spain,
and there are unwritten laws that prohibit talking about suicide on social media.
They are afraid of the imitation effect.
Well, I’m not afraid.
And I think we need a suicide prevention plan in Spain.
By the way, the World Health Organization
strongly recommends talking about suicide
as one of the most important ways to prevent it.
They even drafted a global plan
that the suicide rate would decrease by 10% by 2020.
But the Federation of Mental Health in Spain rejected this plan.
They neither promote nor provide preventive measures for Spain.
There is no strict protocol in Spain
when a person goes to a psychiatrist for help.
For example, if I go to a psychiatrist with suicidal tendencies,
or even if I’ve ever tried to commit suicide,
then it is up to the psychiatrist to decide what to do.
In the case of my mother: she asked for help,
but the psychiatrist did not consider that necessary.
In addition, more than half of people with mental illness
it starts during youth.
In spite of this, in Alicante, where I come from,
but eight beds for children with a mental illness.
It is also absurd to believe
that my mother has paid all her life for insurance,
and when she died
they did not give money to me or my three younger brothers and sisters.
It’s not really about the money,
but because of the fact that my mother was diagnosed with two disorders,
and that they did not take that into account.
If you consider how official agencies deal with suicide,
it is not surprising how people deal with it.
People are afraid to talk about it
and I understand this because I was afraid too.
I was afraid to say that my mother had committed suicide.
And then I lied and said that it was because of cancer, or a heart attack.
When I said the truth, I was looked at differently,
handled differently.
Now that I talk freely about suicide and mental disorders,
can you not imagine how many people –
friends, classmates, neighbors –
already came to me to say that they were also inconvenient
and even attempted suicide.
But they did not ask for help,
because they were afraid what others would think.
I recently met a woman.
She caught a conversation between me and a friend
about mental disorders and the prevention of suicide.
After a while she came to me, embraced me and said:
“Thank you.
You saved my life today. “
She told us that she had been suffering from depression for more than 5 years
and that she did not ask for help because she …
… because she was afraid what others would think.
She had even tried to commit suicide.
After a while she told her that she was strong enough now to ask for help
and the hope that everything would be alright.
I would have liked my mother to have heard the same conversation,
for perhaps that could have saved her life.
But not only my mother’s life,
also the lives of these fifteen people
who have just committed suicide while I was speaking.
Suicide can be prevented,
we only have to change the way we see and treat it.
Something as small as a conversation can occur.
Let’s talk to prevent suicide.
(Applause)
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