24 Feb

# 37 Suicides (Le Mal De Vivre XVI Part )

0 0

Suicides

(Le Mal De Vivre XVI Part )

bulimia

In this sense it’s very interesting, also for a great deal of references to our theses, the story of Dr. Conciani, who became, before committing suicide, a kind of Italian Doctor Death.

He had been given this definition since he had self-accused of having practised euthanasia more than once. He would prescribe terminally ill patients medicines that, if used in massive doses, cause death. Dr. Conciani was well-Known because he was the first Italian doctor to practise abortions officially when they were still forbidden. In fact, in 1975, he was imprisoned with the charge of practising illegal abortions. Besides him there were Marco Pannella, Emma Bonino and Adele Faccio of the Italian Radical Party. The long and difficult trial ended on 11^th October 1990 with a verdict of acquittal for all the defendants.Dr. Giorgio Conciani committed suicide at sixty-seven years of age, one day after his wife’s death.

There is a category, a very large one, of suicides based on an official diagnosis of depressive illness and another much more interesting of suicides without any apparent reason.

We have seen a lot of examples when we spoke about the progressive decrease of suicide age. For the latter particularly, above all if it is a question of very young people, parents and friends hasten, as we saw, to demand privacy and discretion.

Families often try to pass a suicide as a misfortune. Being ashamed to admit their son committed suicide, all this seems to be, in these cases, greater than the pain caused by the loss.

We could say metaphorically suicide, by committing suicide, kills the act itself of committing suicide.

Another explanation is that a very young man’s suicide causes, in the mind of those who remain, such terror and confusion as to urge them to forget, in a hurry, what happened.

We have to notice with great attention how much more sensation causes death penalty for which, though it’s a question of infinitesimal numbers if compared to the ones of suicides and of people that may have committed horrible crimes, mobilitation, as to the one for suicide epidemic, is absolutely excessive.

As to suicide, on the contrary, there is only the silence [1] of mystery or, worse, words like youth unrest which don’t mean anything since also grown-ups of every age commit suicide without reason or as the only remedy to depression. It’s particularly evident depression is the first cause driving to suicide in anorexic young girls.

Anorexia

Anyone who happened, professionally or not, to get in touch with an anorexic girl, knows how much convinced she is to be overweight and be in need of losing weight as to resist any evidence and logic. Amenorrhaea, which often appears with anorexia, confirms the refusal of these teenagers to grow up and be women. Yet in the most serious cases, the ones which often end in a suicide, depression is rather the dominant aspect.

how an anorexic girl sees herself

On examining the problem of anorexic teenagers in the light of the two components, the refusal to grow up and depression, we can notice how, in the cases ended in a suicide, the first cause driving both to anorexia or suicide is depression.

In fact in these cases basic depression first ends in anorexia, in the pathologic attempt to be more admired and this way to impose themselves and be happy by losing weight.

This attempt is destined to fail because the loss of weight doesn’t make happier, on the contrary, with the following lack of vitamins and mineral salts, depression only grows worse, finally driving to suicide. Anorexic people who commit suicide can be found even at thirty-three years of age and it’s frequent, in these cases, to discover family losses preceding depression and anorexia.

An intermediate stage between depression and suicide may be, on the contrary, bulimia and we can understand how taking an excessive quantity of sweet food may be an attempt to soothe the anguish of depression.

We could still continue for long with the list of reasons driving to suicide: charge of fraud, not being able to get rid of drug addiction, the loss of a lot of money by gambling, the piece of news about 80 billion spent for the purchase of a footballer, the failure of Viagra pill[2].

The fact is that the only certain thing of the recent epidemic of suicides is depression which is basic.

depression and suicide

[1] By paraphrasing the title of a famous movie” The silence of the lambs” we could speak of the silence of suicides.

[2] In a study in double-blind, in which two groups of patients, one of them takes the medicine to be tested( in this case Viagra), the other one a placebo, neither the doctors nor the patients know which of them is the pill containing the medicine,a starch pill(placebo) was given to an old man. The only effect of this pill was” to drive” the man to suicide.

anslated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci