Fighting suicide: "By verbalizing suffering, you are already giving it a space to release it."

BarcelonaA good athlete, a straight-A student, well-liked by her family, and with friends. Apparently, there was nothing in Sandy Martos's life that could make her feel bad, but ever since she was little, she felt a nagging urge. At age 8, she remembers having the first of many suicidal thoughts that have haunted her for 25 years, although today, on International Suicide Prevention Day, she wants to be a voice of hope. "I was the typical girl who got an 8 and made a scene, because my minimum was a 10," she explains, now an activist against the stigma throughObertament entity.

This excellence and being a functional child and adolescent worked against her, because in the end she always clashed with the "people would kill for your grades," the family's praise for a brilliant academic record, and the "it's not that big a deal" when she complained. "I don't understand how no one noticed how I dealt with perfectionism," she says, emphasizing that now she knows, from her own and others' experience, that "you don't need great illnesses to be unwell."

Entering college was one of the turning points that marked her. Enrolled in mathematics, Martos found that for the first time she didn't know how to cope with the need to study. She who had reviewed for the exam or done her homework on the subway on the way to school, now found herself faced with demanding subjects. And then the slump came: "I stopped being the smart one, and my lifelong identity disappeared," she explains. From then on, he began a series of admissions to psychiatric units, which he initially tried to "hide." It was easy because he could disguise his absences from class for a few days or even a few weeks.

The click of admission

She says she's had many "clicks" that have made her pick herself up. One of them was a two-month stay in a sub-acute care center, "off the face of the Earth," which forced her to give explanations outside her immediate circle. And she's never held back. She plays rugby and says that in the locker room, she's become the go-to person for many members of the team when they have a problem or feel like they're not quite right. How should you react when someone expresses emotional suffering? "Avoid giving advice; surely no one asked for it, but you do have to listen when someone tells you about emotional pain," she replies, drawing on the experience of having to endure lectures or slaps on the wrist, with a teammate responding, "You're too young to want to die," she said.

She works in a primary care center and is about to begin a data analysis degree, which has her very excited. She says she's in a good place in her life. In part, because activism has helped her "give meaning to life," raising awareness of the taboos, lies, and stigmas surrounding mental suffering while also offering emotional tools, for example, by holding writing workshops for young people like her. However, she admits that suicidal thoughts don't go away and knows that he will have to live together for the rest of his life.

So what? "The difference is the time they take up and the energy I dedicate to one thought of "I want to die""because now, when they come, she lets them in," says Martos, a supporter of talking about the suffering of suicide as a way of preventing it, after so many years in which the word was almost a forbidden word in the public sphere. "Now I'm no longer ashamed, and when you talk you realize that you're not an idiot and that you're a idiot a lot and that you're alone and that you're a idiot a lot and that you're alone and that you talk a lot."

That's why dialogue, the fact of talking about it, is vital.threatened to tie her to the bed If she didn't calm down, there were even workers who extended their working hours to be with her and calm her down. These are examples of the structural problem that exists in the specialized units and emergencies, where the treatment depends on the professional working at the time. "We can't depend on the will of the workers," he says, nor can we be at the mercy of long public health waiting lists, which, he regrets, has made him end up moving to the private sector.