Translator: berat güven Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
This is Roberto, 50 years old, the funniest man I have ever met.
He was always making jokes and making people 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 outgoing young woman
that was always with her friends, trying to live each moment at the fullest.
She was that type of friend you want to have
because she made you feel more alive.
And this is Alex, only 13 years old, a recent teenager.
He loved to read, and when he grew up,
he wanted to be an architect and live in Brasil.
And this is Carmen.
Carmen, 48 years old,
an amazing woman that was in love with life
and treated everyone kindly and tenderly.
So, what do you think all of these four have in common?
They could be family, friends, neighbors.
From society's point of view,
Carmen had everything a woman could ever ask for:
She had a family that adored her, four healthy children and a well-paid job.
What else could she ask for?
She was a real role model,
but what nobody knew is that she was fighting
against a great depression and a personality disorder
that caused her unbearable suffering.
Even though she spent many years fighting in this hard battle,
Carmen committed suicide.
Carmen is my amazing mother, who committed suicide at the age of 48.
By watching this video, would you ever say that she was depressed?
Would you ever say that she had a personality disorder?
Would you believe me if I told you
that this video was only taken a few months before she committed suicide?
And this is what all of these four people have in common.
Roberto, Luisa, Alex and my mum committed suicide.
Roberto suffered from depression,
Luisa suffered from personality disorder,
Alex from bullying and my mum from depression and personality disorder.
Statistically, one out of four has a mental illness.
This means that if it is not you, it is somebody sitting next to you.
More than one million people commit suicide each year.
A person commits suicide every 40 seconds.
Remember Alex - only 13.
You must be thinking:
"What a strange thing. He was too young to do this."
Well, suicide is the first cause of death between teenagers, nowadays.
You could have thought that it was car accidents -
that's what I thought -
but suicide is more than double the rate of deaths by car accidents.
Also, out of every case of gender violence, there are 72 suicides.
And out of everyone that commits suicide,
95% of the people who committed had a mental illness,
100% preventable.
I bet you didn't know anything about this.
This is because in Spain,
there are unwritten laws that ban talking about suicide in social media.
They are scared of the imitation effect.
Well, I am not scared,
and I think it is necessary to have a suicide prevention plan in Spain.
In fact, the World Health Organisation
extremely recommends to talk about suicide
as one of the important ways to prevent it.
They even created a global plan
that would reduce the deaths by suicides by 10% in 2020.
But the Federation of Mental Health in Spain rejected this plan,
and they do not promote nor include any prevention measures for Spain.
In Spain, there is no rigid protocol
when a person goes to a psychiatrist asking for help.
For example, if I go to a psychiatrist saying that I want to commit suicide,
or I have even tried to commit suicide,
it is up to the psychiatrist to decide what to do.
In my mother's case, she went asking for help,
but the psychiatrist didn't consider it necessary.
Moreover, with more than half of the people who have mental illness,
it arises in childhood.
Despite this, in the Province of Alicante, where I am from,
there are only eight beds for children with mental illness.
Also, it is insane to believe
that my mom had been paying for a life insurance all her life,
and when she passed away,
they didn't give any money to my three younger siblings and myself.
And it is not so much about the money,
but it is about the fact that my mom was diagnosed with two mental illnesses,
and they didn't consider it.
Seeing how official organizations treat suicide,
it is no wonder how people treat suicide.
People are scared to talk about it,
and I can understand this because I was scared too.
I was scared to say that my mum had committed suicide.
And I would lie, I would say that it was cancer or a heart attack.
And when I started saying the truth, people looked at me differently,
they treated me differently.
Since I talk freely about suicide and mental illness,
you cannot imagine the amount of people -
friends, classmates, neighbors -
that have come up to me and said that they had been also suffering,
and they had even tried to commit suicide.
But they didn't ask for help,
because they were scared of what others might think.
The other day, I met a woman.
She was overhearing a conversation I was having with a friend,
about mental illness and about preventing suicide.
After a while, she came up to me, she hugged me, and she said,
"Thank you. Today, you saved my life."
She told us that she had been suffering with a depression for over five years,
and that she didn't ask for help because she ...
because she was scared of what others might think.
She even said she had tried to commit suicide.
After a while, she told us that she had the strength to ask for help
and the hope that everything was going to be alright.
I just wished my mum had heard the same conversation
because maybe it could have saved her life.
But not only my mum's life,
the lives of these 15 people
that just committed suicide while I was talking.
Suicide is preventable, we just need to change the way we see it and treat it.
Something as small as a conversation can prevent it.
Let's talk to prevent suicide.
(Applause)