Fernando Gómez, 21, gave a TED talk last November, where he referred to the subject of suicide in the first person. The young man analyzed the problem and from his experience, he stated: “Talking about suicide saved my life. If I hadn’t done it, maybe I wouldn’t be here today.”
Originally from América, a town in the Province of Buenos Aires that is home to some 11,000 inhabitants, he grew up with his mother and brothers. Today, he lives in La Plata and studies Psychology at the National University of La Plata.
“I don’t want to talk about anything; when I play hangman, I know it’s a game but I’ve thought about it anyway. That bullying at school because I’m a weird swan: a torment, a punishment, I don’t give more, I’m tired. Like a leaf in the wind, I travel without a destination: a spring, a heartbeat, not feel so cowardly. I am a null kid, invisible and unheard, although I shout in silence ‘deaf town, big hell’. Another forgotten piece of news ‘look, I’m I’m hanging!’, another case of suicide with my name, which is Fernando”, stated the young man at the beginning of his presentation.
“In my head at that time there were two solutions: either I was to blame for having different tastes or it was the fault of the others, and they were all against me,” said the young man because of his tastes that were not the same as that of the adolescents of his town. “I became convinced that I was the one who had to adapt to the rest, so I started forcing myself to go to certain sports groups. Obviously, forcing you to do something you don’t like with people you don’t like you agree makes it very unpleasant ”, he pointed out in a report with Infobae.
The young man’s discomfort grew over time and he began to withdraw, his family noticed it and after recommending that he visit a psychologist, he was diagnosed with “social anxiety”, a disorder that causes tremors, sweating, palpitations and physical discomfort. The young man began to wear the hood on a daily basis and it served as consolation for him to assert: “if they don’t see me, they can’t insult me.” In order to go unnoticed, he kept his hood on whether it was hot or cold, wherever he was.”
“In my case, suicidal thoughts were a symptom. Of what? Of the anguish, of the anxiety generated by not being able to find a way out,” he said. Fernando, fought these thoughts between the ages of 11 and 16: “I I felt exhausted, and in general people who have had these kinds of thoughts say that what they want is to sleep forever.
There, he began to practice parkour, a discipline that consists of overcoming obstacles, stairs or slopes with jumps, where he met a group of teenagers like him. “With this group, those who are my friends today, I began to feel calmer: they were kids who liked the same thing as me, kids who were tired of being bothered. Kids who at some point had also thought about commit suicide”.
At school, like his classmates, he was affected by the tragedies he read about in one of the subjects. There, he set up a classroom debate about suicide, whether it only occurred in those tragedies or was it a problem that also affected them. Said debate motivated them to carry out a project to deal with a taboo subject: “Do an anonymous survey in the school and in all the schools of the Rivadavia party that they let us and ask that: how many kids had ever thought about committing suicide, who did they tell it to, if they had ever thought about self-flagellation, if they had, why did they have these thoughts”.
“The results that most impacted me I remember by heart. Two out of 10 had ever thought about committing suicide. Most said that ‘due to lack of love, depression and family problems’, and that they had not told any adult, only to a friend “, he added. The results were brought to the Hospital, where they were not admitted and were not taken as “real”.
“I think we have to talk about it,” said the young man and added: “Rather giving information: showing how a person who is in that situation feels, telling what he can do, refuting myths.”
Thus, about the closing of his presentation, Fernando expressed: “If I had not told my friends, I would not have realized that those thoughts were making me sick. If I had not done the surveys, if we had not debated the issue, if I wouldn’t have given that talk, maybe I wouldn’t be here today. That’s why I always say that: talking about suicide saved my life.”
