The director of the Puig de les Basses prison, Jordi Oliveras, has resigned from his post following the suicide of three inmates at the penitentiary center since the beginning of the year. The last one was this Monday, when a prisoner who was in isolation took his own life. The Department of Justice and Democratic Quality reported this Friday that in the coming days there will be "a change" at the head of the Figueres prison and a new director will be appointed. According to the department, the director until now has placed his position at the disposal of the Secretariat of Penal Measures and Reintegration and its head, Elena Pérez, has accepted the resignation.

Last year, 22 young people were admitted to the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Reference Unit (URPI) at Santa Catalina Hospital in Salt for suicide attempts. This is five more cases than the previous year. Behind each attempt lies immense suffering and despair, both for the young people at risk of suicide and for their families, who plead for more resources so that the authorities "don't let their children die" and provide more funding for the child and adolescent mental health care system. "When it comes to budget allocations, to making a serious commitment, it's always last in line. When a teenager is in crisis, a three-month wait for a psychologist in the public health system isn't just an administrative delay. It's an eternity that can have fatal consequences," laments journalist Sònia Cebrian, the mother of a child admitted to Santa Catalina Hospital in Salt for a suicide attempt. She was there for fifteen days and was discharged this Wednesday. "Healthcare and education professionals are overwhelmed and can't keep up with everything, and families are improvising stopgap measures that only allow them to stay afloat through struggle and isolation," Cebrian adds. The testimony of Sonia, as the mother of a teenager with a mental disorder and several suicide attempts, and that of Ingrid, as a young woman suffering this ordeal, exemplify the scale of a problem that carries a high emotional and financial cost for those who experience it and which, as Sonia says, "is needed." When the solution is a loan

More and more studies and experts warn that suicide is more common among our youth. The data corroborate this: suicide has become one of the leading causes of death among young people between the ages of 15 and 29. Furthermore, almost 20% of adolescents have thought about suicide at some point in their lives, according to a report on mental health prepared by the Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) in collaboration with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). At the same time, according to another report promoted by IDIAPJGol, cases of self-harm among children and young people between the ages of 10 and 24 have experienced an alarming increase of 267% between 2013 and 2022.