Suicide: A Failure Of All

A real case

I clearly remember an episode from when I was a child in which my grandmother, a widow of the war and with five children, desperate for the problems that were accumulating, said that she was already fed up, that she did not want to live any longer and that she was going to fuck by a storm surge.

Neither short nor lazy, she grabbed the door and started walking toward the outskirts of town.

As if she were the Pied Piper of Hamelin, grandchildren, daughters and even neighbors went after her so she wouldn’t do it

When he reached his destination, he looked at all of us, turned around, and didn’t jump.

We were there because we wanted her and we wanted her alive, with her highs and lows, with her black skirts and her gray bun, and she got it.

Other times he would go to bed and not even get up to eat. Nobody was scandalized. Family members cared for her and came to see her as if she were ill. They encouraged her and when a few days passed, she would start working again, without further ado.

Currently, when we talk about suicides, we always think of an individual act, someone whose cables are crossed, but that has nothing to do with us, or with the type of society that we are creating together.

Why are there so many suicides?

It is no coincidence that in recent years there has been an alarming increase in suicides. 20% more since the beginning of the crisis, a figure that has doubled the deaths from traffic accidents.

Something is failing at the collective level. Although anyone who tries to kill themselves is because they feel overwhelmed and cannot find a place in this world, the truth is that the new suicides manifest a social failure.

From the adolescent who feels rejected in the networks, to the unemployed or evicted, through those who, even taking antidepressants, continue to feel anguish.

The underlying issue is the high level of demand they face and the little echo they find around them.

In recent decades we have been changing affectivity for accounting effectiveness

Human relationships are brewing at the whistle and under the whip of success, efficiency, competitiveness, popularity, accumulation and profitability. We have been transferring the values ​​of the business world to affective and social ties. Human beings are social subjects by definition and, depending on the type of relationships we establish between us, any of its members may feel judged or excluded.

Chained to our public image

Life has become a techno-profitable management where kindness, understanding and affection are considered “excesses”.

Everything starts from birth itself: automated births, encouragement to artificial breastfeeding and the taking off of the mother-child bond, nurseries at an increasingly early age and rigid and equal learning techniques for all. Endless school days that include lunch and subsequent extracurricular activities.

This involves a vision of the children and their development through medical-pediatric or school technical reports. There is thus a transfer from the family and neighborhood environment to an outside field full of uniform and global rules where individuality, differences and, ultimately, the person, have no place.

We see it in teenagers and their quest to be the most popular in high school and in collecting likes on Instagram and flirts on Tinder. The alternative is to be an anguished and depressed “hung”, and from there suicidal ideas can arise.

In these crises, a professional may intervene again who, by prescribing antidepressants, places the subject in front of a feeling that theirs is hopeless and that they will never succeed.

The circle closes and the only idea that is fixed in these people is to get out of the way and not suffer, or make people suffer.

Goodbye to privacy

This model does not change in adults in a society where not only “you have so much, you are worth so much” prevails more and more , but you are either a member of a successful and productive social system or you are outside of it.

In addition, this division is based on whether you have purchasing power or not. Thus, the feeling of belonging to the group depends on the number of things that are owned (credit cards, homes, cars …) or that are made (trips that are made or number of restaurants visited) and that will also be disclosed by the social networks previous photo.

We post our life and those who cannot keep up with that exposure rhythm in the background are, or feel, failures

Again we see the circle close. The subjects, identified with that marginality, with that residue where the system places them, feel that they are nothing and that, therefore, they have to disappear.

Gone are the bohemian ways of life, fueled by passion. Everything has been reversed, we have changed the feeling internally according to our own peculiarities and interests and appreciating those of others, for a profitable way of life from outside and outside.

In this social setting, my grandmother would not have been my grandmother, but a psychiatric picture in which the neutralization of her “oddities” would have ended her personality for the sake of an effective, neutral and clean “general good” of any family affectivity and community.