The death of Olga, an evicted resident of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat who committed suicide on September 7th, has brought me suddenly, head-on and in tears, back to November 2010. Almost automatically, like a sudden spring of memory. On November 11th of that year, Miguel committed suicide, also in L'Hospitalet, shortly before being evicted. So far and yet so close, between the houses where Olga and Miguel lived there is only a kilometer or so, fifteen minutes on foot and 15 years and 10 months of distance. Connect the dots, because in between there are thousands of evicted families –400,000 in the Catalan Countries–. Even if only descriptively, politically geolocated, it must be added that in November 2010 Catalonia was governed by a formal left-wing tripartite. Today, an informal tripartite. In between, everything has happened and everyone has passed through, here –Mas, Puigdemont, Torra, Aragonès, Illa– and there –from Rajoy to Sánchez–. I say this because between both deaths, what has not changed one bit is the immobilism in housing matters, whoever was governing and with the relevant nuances. But everything is terrifying and leaves us hollowed out, when time never passes in vain. In 2010, the stock of protected social housing in Catalonia did not reach 2%, well below the European average of 15%. In 2026 we are still there: 1.7%. At the tail end of the EU and on the podium of daily evictions. 15 little years and nothing has happened here. Or perhaps it has. Rearrange the chairs: between now and 2040, in the Barcelona area alone, 50,000 protected housing apartments will be lost. And that explains so many things; too many things, perhaps; or maybe all at once.However, of the things that have indeed changed –and for the worse– I fear that the most savage is to reveal how the legitimization of cruelty, the apology for social sadism, the indifference towards the suffering of others, and the aporophobia that so criminalizes poverty have grown exponentially. A growth that also takes a demoscopic and electoral form, with the rise of the extreme rights that condense all their courage into the manifest cowardice of always blaming those who are most screwed for everything. White bullets for black balls. There are those who even –without knowing any detail of the case, as if they were at a bar counter– have wanted to opine gratuitously about Olga's death, pretending to decouple the eviction from the suicide and describing the informative link as "journalistic irresponsibility". I will spare myself from delving into the high doses of mean-spirited insensitivity, but it had been a long time since I saw someone so misinformed talking about misinformation and informing us so punctually of their brutal misinformation. The person who said this is the vice-president of a newly born and singular Federation of Neighbors presided over by hotelier Joan Gaspart. All of this ties in with one of the most symptomatic data points from the latest CEO, where response and voting orientation are crossed when asked "if one can almost always trust people". 41% defend it. Those who defend it the most are not the voters of Vox, PP, and AC and, in the face of all the dead ends and difficulties, they believe this is a civil war of all against all. On the other side, there are those who know that, in the face of all the difficulties and the same dead ends, there is nothing more than the democratic possibility of life in common.

"We took Paula to the emergency room at least a hundred times," say Germán and Beatriz, the parents of Paula Baquedano Martínez, who for five years fought for someone to help her get out of the pit she was in. She suffered from borderline personality disorder and self-harm became her daily life.

The prisoner who committed suicide this weekend in a cell at Quatre Camins had been living in the intake module for months, separated from the rest. According to what ARA has learned, he was living in isolation as a measure to protect him from other inmates from whom he had received death threats. He had been in this situation since June, and although this measure allowed him to leave his cell for two hours a day, he had not left for about a month.

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.