Ribera launches the first “blank” campaign to raise awareness of the importance of giving visibility to suicide

• The healthcare group’s psychiatric services give five keys in order to help prevent what is the main external cause of death.
• A person commits suicide every two and a half hours in Spain and specialists are warning of the impact of the pandemic, reflected in the increase in cases and attempts.

Valencia, 9^th, September, 2021 –  The Ribera healthcare group will launch the first “blank” campaign in order to raise awareness of the importance of giving visibility to the act of voluntarily taking your own life, as it is defined in the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), tomorrow, on World Suicide Prevention Day. The graphic representation of the campaign, a blank page, aims to highlight, as the short caption in the lower left-hand corner shows, the silence that surrounds this behaviour in Spain. The message reads: “This page shows the visibility of suicide in Spain, being the main external cause of death. In order to prevent suicide, we must talk about it”.

The initiative, which reflects the Ribera healthcare group’s commitment to responsible health, is completed with a landing page design, hablamosdelsuicidio.com. And in Spain alone, a person voluntarily takes their own life every two and half hours, that is to say, almost ten people a day, 3,700 a year. Globally, a suicide is registered every 30 seconds. It is the cause of twice as many deaths as traffic accidents, and with the increase in cases as a consequence of Covid and its impact on habits and social behaviours, many consider it to be “the hidden pandemic”.

As a socially responsible company, the Ribera group and its specialists in psychiatric services at their hospitals are committed to a “change in the attitude of society, which has to learn how to talk normally about the subject, and with involvement from everyone, from families to friends, work colleagues and healthcare professionals, in prevention”. This is because, they add, “preventing suicide is possible, if it is talked about”.

Furthermore, on the website that supports the campaign, they point out five keys in order to understand and prevent this behaviour: “Suicide exists”, they remind us, showing the shocking statistics such as those previously mentioned; “There are no two suicides alike”, they affirm, because “suicide is a complete interaction of various biological, psychological, social, genetic and environmental factors”; “Nobody who is happy commits suicide”, they explain, because those who commit this act “want to stop suffering and don’t see hope, considering it their only way out”. “The person who commits suicide has gone to the doctor”, they add, as the study of the majority of cases shows. And although they explain that “the patients with the greatest risk are those that have illnesses related to the central nervous system and other chronic illnesses, in 90% of the cases last year they went to the doctor due to anxiety, depression or for physical problems that affected them psychologically”. However, the most important key, they affirm, is that “suicide can be prevented, detecting it early and intervening in a professional, family or social setting, in a personalized way.