Behind a person who commits suicide or attempts to do so, there is more than a statistic: there is a family suffering, while the issue remains as a taboo.
Only in 2015, 1,408 people tried to commit suicide and in the first half of 2016, 578 people attempted to do so. However, last year, 291 people could do it. They are not just numbers, these are people who urgently need help.
Suicide is a public health problem. It is not a taboo, people have to talk, it is a real problem that needs to be solved,
said Allan Rimola, from the Technical Secretariat of Mental Health from the Ministry of Health.
According to Rimola, people need to have a treatment in order to return to normal life. They should not be seen as survivors but as people who reintegrate into society.
The Ministry is working on strategies to deal with this issue:
-Leadership and Governance: it will be clear the coordination and responsability that institutions will have.
-Promotion and prevention: institutions have to promote protective factors, so that people have tools and know how to deal with these situations and if there are risk factors, fatale events can be prevented.
-Attention: to work with the people from the moment they are identified until they are reintegrated into society.
-Research and evaluation: it will allow institutions to monitor their strategies so that they can know which of them are really effective in order to reproduce them at national level.