Mental health care contributes to suicide prevention

The campaign Yellow September highlights care, awareness and suicide prevention . Every year more than 700,000 people take their own lives in the world, according to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The public health problem affects entire families, communities and countries and has lasting effects on people. Suicide was the fourth leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds worldwide in 2019.

O CNN Vital Signs deepens the subject with reports of people who found themselves in one of the most critical situations in the context of mental health (watch in full above ).

Critical situation

The writer, editor and founder of Companhia das Letras, Luiz Schwarcz, tells how the situation of lack of control led him to stay in a clinic and to understand the experience with depression. Schwarcz released in March 2021 the book “The air I lack: a story of a short childhood and a long depression”.

One of the biggest names in the history of the Brazilian publishing market reveals how depression and the traumas experienced in the family, such as the silence of his father, who did not talk about himself or his past, and the pressure of being an only child with the mission of promote harmony in the house, have affected him for decades.

“Among the many mental illnesses, the one that is most frequently associated with suicide is precisely depression”, explains the psychiatrist and former coordinator of the Program for the Control of Mental Disorders and Neurological Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO), José Manoel Bertolote.

According to experts, depression and suicide are public health problems that must be addressed by improving mental health services in Brazil, with consistent public policies in the area.

National and global data

The WHO released guidance in June 2021 to reduce the suicide rate by a third by 2030 worldwide. According to the entity, in 2019, more than 700,000 people died by suicide, which represents one person in every 100 deaths. According to the WHO, there are 320 million depressed people in the world.

In Brazil, from 2011 to 2017, 80,352 deaths from suicide were recorded in the population aged ten years and older, of which 27% occurred in the age group of 15 to 29 years, 79% of which were male. There are 13,392 deaths of the type per year in the country, according to data from the Ministry of Health.

“Depression is a disease like any other that must be treated”, says the president of the Brazilian Psychiatry Association, Antônio Geraldo. “People talk like this: react, push hard. There is no such thing. It’s like taking off your glasses and saying: look, can you read this here… ‘boy, I have ten degrees of myopia, I won’t see’. Depression is like that too. If you don’t treat it, it’s no use for anyone to say: ‘react, try’ ”, he says.

“The cure for depression does not come from just one thing: it comes from family support, medication and physical exercise”, points out Luiz Schwarcz, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “It was also essential that I did 13 years of analysis and then another three years of therapy/analysis”, he adds.

“Bipolar disorder is characterized by a fluctuation of mood between the two poles: depressive, when the person is very sad, discouraged, unwilling, can be associated with insomnia and other symptoms in the body, with changes in appetite”, explains the psychiatrist. Alan Campos, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Hospital das Clínicas de São Paulo.

“And some other moments the opposite pole, that is: excess energy, lack of need for sleep, you feel fine even without sleeping, expose yourself to many risks, do many activities, start to have difficulty concentrating”, he adds.

Relatives’ reports

Philosophy student Marina Maximo loved to play the guitar and study languages. Fluent in English, she was learning French and Catalan. Severe depression drove her, at age 19, to suicide.

“As a teenager, around 14 to 16 years old, she became more agitated and moody. Her mood changed, the noise bothered her, there were days when she wanted to stay in her room all day, she only went out to study”, says her mother Terezinha Maximo. “She started to cut herself, not sleep anymore and cry a lot”. The family went to a doctor and was diagnosed with depression, social phobia and anxiety.

“It’s the fourth generation. Where is so-and-so? In the bedroom. He’s on the cell phone, on the computer, sometimes he’s on the small screen, because he can’t stand the outside world. And they are the people who spend the most time on social media, they are depressed teenagers”, warns psychiatrist Alexandrina Meleiro.

“What did I do wrong? I didn’t give enough love, all these issues that mainly come to the mother, who is always held responsible. These are questions that we will never have an answer to. And that kept ringing in my head. Apart from the loss, apart from the pain of everything that grief brings”, says Terezinha.

A study by the University of Kentucky in the United States showed that approximately 135 people are impacted by a single suicide. In addition, it is estimated that 25 people close to the victim may try to kill themselves or have suicidal thoughts.

“That’s why we need to act with the ‘post-vention’, which is every intervention made after a suicide, that is, it’s all work and activities that we do with the bereaved who commonly may have feelings of guilt: ‘I could have done something’, ‘I didn’t pay attention,’” says psychologist Karen Scavacini.

After the loss of her daughter, Terezinha Maximo began to write to face what she felt. She started researching on the subject, attended support groups and, in November 2017, eight months after Marina’s death, she launched the website No m’oblidis, together with her husband, Joseval. The name is in reference to a message that Terezinha found on her daughter’s WhatsApp status, the meaning is “please don’t forget me”, translating from Catalan.

Signs that may indicate mental health problems