FINAL ESSAY

NICOLAS MUÑOZ

T: SAYRA LOZANO

TALLER DE LECTURA Y ESCRITURA

BA IN ENGLISH

FACULTDAD CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN

UNIVERSIDAD DEL TOLIMA

2019
 A post-modern blind death

Nowadays and with all capacity of freedom to express and share our ideas and feelings,
depression and mental illnesses have become a taboo in western community cultures
(Perez,2018). A lot of deaths by suicide have been committed in this century; the proofs are
obvious: most of those deaths had presented a big connection between mental illnesses
(Ramirez & Naranjo, 2041) and young people (KidsHealth). Taking this, our society has
created a blind response against this situation, silencing and ignoring the future victims just
for the fear of talking about this topic. Also the responsible entities are not facing duly how
to decrease; instead of that they just create campaigns that give poor solutions, like just
offering phone lines to call(Peterson).In brief, the following written is going to touch the
topic of how people do not want to assume this new suicide pandemic , especially in young
people (BMJ), due to the ignorance and few competence of every one of us to know how
mental illnesses and depression attack.

In first instance, about 80000 people commit suicide every year (OMS). This point, combined
with the idea that we have that our society make a silence when someone commits suicide,
in terms of not to talk properly about the most important: the cause of the suicide. People
generally that if a young person kill himself, was because he was a coward, a gaudy or a
crybaby. So, for this reason an ill person with these thoughts are never going to talk about
his problems because people are going to believe that is a stupid person that just wants to
draw attention, creating a silence culture. Therefore, our society needs to inform about real
causes of what leads people to commit suicide, that in fact are involved with mental deseases
like depression, bipolar disorder , using psychological and psychiatric references of how
these disorders affect them. This means that if people knew the main causes of suicide, a
person with any kind of mental problem would not be too afraid to talk about it.

Nevertheless, here is another situation to face and it is that people preferred to ignore a suicide
because they think that doing that, it is going to disappear magically. This happens mainly in
underdeveloped countries which suicide is higher. For example, here in Colombia people and
mass media usually act in this way: someone kills himself, then the news present the case as
they were worried and finally Colombian people watch the news and believe how sad must
be the victim’s family. But then, what people do? They just ignore or pass over the new,
instead of think that the next case could be a relative or acquaintance. It is true when I think
that my country lives this expression: “Preferimos curar que prevenir”. In conclusion, people
do not confront the problem and also do not think about it as a possible worst issue.

Last and worst, government and not government entities as Minister of social protection and
health or “Asociación internacional para la prevención del suicidio” (ISAP) do not offer
proper solutions. All that we get from them are number phones to call and talk of how, when
and where you are going to do it because as I mentioned at the beginning, the big origin of
suicide is related with mental diseases. For this reason, these entities should use professionals
in the area because they are the only people prepared theory and practically to attend in the
best way these diseases. In this way, if organizations used the appropriate techniques, those
ill people would take the help and would not kill themselves.

In sum, we are leaving that these deaths still happening, due to how people do not saying
anything to help, or if they say something, it is just to judge them. The other issue is that even
if the problem is talked, it is ignored easily and quickly. Finally all the programs against
suicide use poor tools that do not help for real.