This Tuesday, October 10, World Suicide Prevention Day was celebrated, a day in which an attempt is made to make visible a problem that continues to be taboo today. According to the latest official data, the Canary Islands closed 2022 with 233 suicides. Marta Ceñal founded a Facebook page called El Descanso de Pedro (Pedro's Rest) in 2018 after her son's suicide at the end of 2017.
For this reason, she approached a parish so that they could leave her a place to hold meetings in person. "That's how I started in 2018, and in 2019 I created an association called GAMAS (Mutual Aid Group of People Affected by Suicide), which offers mutual aid to people affected by suicide based here in Lanzarote," she says.
Likewise, they carry out workshops and talks with which they have finally managed to enter schools and institutes to raise awareness, from an early age, about this social problem. "It cost us a lot because they closed the doors in all the institutes until in 2023 talks began to be given at the Costa Teguise institute," she says.
In addition, over the years people from all over the world have joined, from countries such as Mexico and Argentina, and also from the peninsula of Madrid or Valencia.
Teenagers, the most likely to commit suicide
Regarding the increase in suicides, "in adolescents it has tripled," Ceñal details. One of the fundamental factors is the competitiveness of the institutes, since "grades, social networks, bullying and harassment increase this problem," she explains.
"A lot of hand is already being put in because the kids isolate themselves when these talks are given in the centers where they are informed that there are resources and that they have to request them if they feel bad or someone is harassing them," she says. "I think it is an important way to start prevention in schools and institutes so that our children grow up with a healthy mind," she says.
Mental health education should be done from the beginning of adolescence, from the age of 13. "When children are their age, their fundamental part is their friends, their group, and when they are separated or harassed, they don't usually show it, they keep it quiet," she clarifies.
How to act in the face of a person who has suicidal thoughts
Changes in behavior to identify if a person has this type of thought can be key. "We have to be aware because those important and sudden changes in their behavior mean that something internally is not right and, if it is not right, they may have an outbreak," she declares.
These changes can be behavioral or verbal. In the case of Marta Ceñal, when looking back and seeing the attitude her son had before taking his own life, she realized that he began to have unusual behaviors in him. "He began to have very dangerous attitudes, which I attributed to the fact that he was young," she recalls.
According to Ceñal, young people who have suicidal thoughts "are bothered by everything and do not want to share anything with the family." In addition, "if they used to sleep a lot, now they stop sleeping, if they went out a lot with friends, they isolate themselves," she says. These behaviors are usually contrary to those they had before, when they were psychologically healthy.
Empathy plays a fundamental role when speaking and acting. "Being empathetic is vital because we cannot understand many times what they are going through and many times we say phrases like 'with everything you have' or 'with everything I have given you'," Ceñal explains.
This is the worst thing we can say to someone because what we should do is "empathize with him or her and tell him or her that we will get out of this problem together," she says. We must put ourselves on the person's side so that they feel supported and understood, that they see that we are not downplaying the matter because it is truly something serious.
"They are in a spiral that they don't know how to get out of and we must take them out by the hand, not judge them and, above all, listen, which is something very difficult," she advises.
Advances that are still insufficient
In recent years, the words suicide and prevention have been put on the table, something that until a few years ago was completely taboo.
Visibility is key so that this ailment stops being stigmatized and means are put in place to fight against it. And it is that when someone commits suicide, the victim is not only the deceased person, but the rest of their family and environment. "For each person who commits suicide, a minimum of six people are affected and of those six, not all take the path that I have taken," clarifies Marta Ceñal.
GAMAS is attended by family members in search of help, support and understanding to better cope with the grief they face due to the loss of a family member. "Many of them enter a grief that they do not overcome or are with depression going to a psychiatrist and with treatments with medication," she says. In addition, she says that some of those family members "also end up committing suicide because their child has died and they cannot live with that pain," she says.
For this reason, the Association is trying to get the Cabildo of Lanzarote to provide them with money to have a permanent psychologist within the entity itself and that people with few resources can use. "Not everyone can pay 60 euros a week to access this service and, in addition, the little preparation that psychologists still have regarding suicide," she argues.
Recently, since 2023, the Psychology degree already includes in its last year a subject on prevention and master's degrees have also been created.
If you need help against suicide or know someone who requires it, the telephone number 024 is intended for this and is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
