At the age of 12, Bea (she prefers not to give her full name) began to feel that something was not right in her life. A perfectionist to the extreme, obsessed with always getting her best grade, she sensed that something was breaking inside her. “I have always seen myself reflected in numbers and when, because I couldn’t concentrate, I started not getting the best grades, I became obsessed with the numbers on the scale. I have always gone from number to number. “Numbers have controlled my life.” She suffered from an eating disorder. She was admitted to a hospital, separated from the institute, forced for periods to take only one 20-minute walk a day to avoid losing calories. Increasingly sinking into herself, more and more hurt inside and each time storing up more pain, she tried to commit suicide twice. “Life had no meaning. What I wanted was for the pain to stop.”
At the age of 12, the singer and music producer Zahara suffered bullying at school, experienced an anxiety crisis every time she went to school, was a victim of sexual abuse and kept all that suffering a secret, blaming herself for it. that unbearable life. At that time, some afternoons, when she returned home, she would go into a phone booth and try to dial the help line for her youngest. “I knew I couldn’t tell my parents what was happening to me, but maybe I could tell a stranger,” she recalls. But she was never able to dial the whole number, which she counted only in three digits, and she left the booth without speaking to anyone, feeling even more useless and more helpless than she had when she had entered. Shortly afterward she tried to commit suicide.
The testimonies of these two women appear in the overwhelming first chapter of the docuseries Suicide, the invisible painfour chapters, produced by RTVE Play and The Story Lab, which will be broadcast in full starting Monday the 20th on the public platform. The first episode abounds in the stories of these two women when they were teenagers; The second talks about professionals who fight against suicide, and focuses on the figure of Sergio Tubío, a firefighter who has developed an intervention protocol so that his colleagues know how to act in the event of a suicide attempt; The third is filmed almost entirely in a rural area, between Córdoba and Jaén, where suicide attempts proliferate; and the fourth speaks, among other things, of the family members, relatives and friends of those who have died by suicide. The docuseries is complemented by three podcast in which testimonies are collected from minors who have survived suicide attempts. There is a key phrase that serves as a common thread throughout the work and that is repeated by both Bea, Zahara and the firefighter Tubio: “Whoever thinks about suicide does not want to stop living, they want to stop suffering.”
Conchi Cejudo, director of the docuseries and podcasts, knows that the topic “has been and is a taboo and not talking about it has generated a stigma that weighs on family members and on people who have survived a suicide attempt.” And she adds: “It is like this because we have not talked about this and the media are primarily responsible. There is the idea of the possible contagion effect. But it is not true”. It is precisely the opposite: speaking it helps. In the first chapter, Zahara assures: “If someone had told me about what was happening to me, if I could have had a reference to explain it to me, I would not have tried to commit suicide.” Now: not talking about suicide is as irresponsible as speaking badly. For this reason, for example, the docuseries does not specify the way in which the protagonists have resorted to trying to take their own lives so as not to serve as a stimulus.
According to the WHO, there are 700,000 suicides in the world each year. In Spain, 4,000. That is: 11 a day. And for every suicide there are 20 attempts that remain attempts. “That is to say: right now there are 80,000 people in Spain with that invisible pain inside, who need help,” adds Cejudo. Toni Garrido, producer of the series, acknowledges that the testimonies are very hard, that it is a difficult job to watch: “It is the first time that it has happened to me that we have had to stop filming because one of the technicians has started to cry” . But he adds that as a society “we must look at this problem face to face, without running away from it.”
Firefighter Tubio assures that one of the secrets is to listen to these people who walk on the edge of the precipice. And they themselves recognize that talking about what happens to them, feeling heard, is the first step to get out of there. Cejudo exemplifies this: “There is a girl whose testimony could not be entered but who told us that when she was in the hospital room, after a suicide attempt, with her body all in a cast, she said to herself: ‘Everyone asks me about the broken bones, but no one sees that the pain I feel is somewhere else, that the pain that truly matters is inside, which cannot be seen.”
Today Zahara is a remade woman of 39 years old, a renowned singer who assumes that music brought her out of the bottom of the well: “I started composing when I was 12 years old. I turned all that suffering into songs and that meant that I could tell it and if I could tell it I wouldn’t need to try to commit suicide. Sometimes you don’t have normal words, you don’t know how to express in words something like I want to commit suicide, and that’s why you need another language. And mine was music.”
Bea is today an optimistic 19-year-old woman studying Medicine at university. She left behind her the dark stage in which she wrote phrases like: “I have demons knocking at my door” on the wall of her room. Today she has her left arm full of old cut marks, scars. “They are proof of the battle I have experienced with myself.” She does not deny that left arm. But she has filled her right with tattoos. “That way people don’t notice each other,” she says, with a smile.
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