Bologna, 9 October 2021 – He waited for that the parents arrived in Bologna for the graduation party. But that thesis in Economics and Commerce for which mum and dad came to town, he had never even prepared it. Very few exams taken and perhaps the fear and shame of telling the truth to those who had taken him up to that moment led him to make an extreme gesture. silencing that sense of guilt at just 29, with a leap into the void from the Stalingrad bridge. Useless the race of the friend to whom around 16 yesterday he had written a message saying where he was. When the police and his friend arrived on that bridge it was too late.
The psychologist: “Failure is not a fault”
The former Urbino throws himself out of the window before graduation and dies. It was all made up
Yesterday’s is just the latest tragedy, three days ago to take his own life by throwing himself from the balcony of his house after writing an apology note to his parents, was a girl of just 12 years. We asked the psychologist and psychotherapist Linda Degli Esposti if and how to recognize any warning signs.
Can the shame of a lie push you to make a tragic gesture like this?
“Beyond the apparent motivations, a person has very deep personal frailties to decide to take his own life. Whatever happened to him. Only the total loss of hope can push you to make the most unnatural gesture that exists. are the reasons that made you enter that tunnel without light “.
Is it possible to recognize some signs from the family?
“It is not easy to understand and evaluate the boundary between even temporary depression and such an absolute decision as to take one’s own life. Even experts sometimes struggle to understand which patient is at high suicidal risk. I think it is even more difficult and complicated when Affections also come into play. And depression itself can have different facets: not always, as is common to think, is associated with silence, isolation and sadness in general. Sometimes it can also manifest itself with feelings of anger “.
Keeping an open dialogue with a teenage child is often not easy …
“Of course it is not easy, you have to listen. And the message that has to pass is that although I am now yelling at you for that messy room or for that 4 in math I still love you and I will love you anyway and whoever you are or you will become “.
Can society with its increasingly high-performance demands play a role in these tragedies?
“I do not think, I believe that everyone, I repeat, has to deal with their own frailties. There have also been historical moments far worse than this but the incidence of suicides was not greater. I believe instead that the responsibility of a civil society is to investing in mental health services: precisely in the Covid era, a space dedicated to teenagers at high suicidal risk was cut in the Major. Disinvesting means giving up, not offering an answer to the many families who find themselves facing the problem of depression at home “.
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