Suicide Attempts: The Uncounted Toll

Suicide: Ten Deaths a Day and a Hundred Uncounted Attempts

In Spain, suicide claims about ten lives every day, according to the calculation repeated in public discourse. This figure is presented by a participant as a statistical data point and is echoed in calculations circulating when the subject is addressed without euphemisms. To these ten completed cases, according to the same estimate, we must add around a hundred daily attempts that do not appear in any record. Three out of every four completed suicides are men, again according to this estimate. This is the part that no one counts.

The Attempts That Don't Appear in Any Statistics

The record breaks precisely where it hurts the most. Only completed cases are counted, meaning every attempt that does not end in death goes unnoted. Some recount having experienced one of these episodes and ending up two days under hospital observation; others describe an attempt in August of last year. None appear in the figures. Therefore, the gap between ten and a hundred is not a minor detail: it represents half of the phenomenon, the part that is poorly measured or not measured at all.

Why Many People Dismiss the Idea: Family and Pain

When the question turns personal, the most cited deterrent is the suffering of loved ones. They would never understand, summarizes one viewpoint. Another barrier is physical antiestéticar: some admit to having fantasized about the idea and discarding it due to the antiestéticar of pain involved in pushing the body to its limit. A third approach does not rule anything out but would only consider it in the face of a terminal or disabling illness, such as multiple sclerosis. And a fourth suggests that ideation is often linked to a specific difficult period: those who struggled at twenty-two acknowledge that things improved later.

Working, Moving, and Other Ways to Defuse the Idea

Another perspective holds that these thoughts appear primarily during idle hours. Working provides focus; it is at home, in a bad neighborhood, or with troublesome neighbors where the mind drifts there on its own. From this viewpoint, changing cities improves quality of life and defuses the ideas before they escalate. This is not a thesis backed by data, but it aligns with the pattern of those who link it to specific circumstances rather than a permanent condition.

The Social Circle: A Burden or a Relief?

Here, the reasoning becomes self-contradictory. If the argument for staying alive is to avoid causing suffering to family, some respond that, after the grief, those same family members might even end up happier. The deterrent of not hurting others then becomes a cycle: one lives for others without knowing if those others gain or lose. The discussion, at this point, remains unresolved.

Fantasizing about the idea is not the same as seriously considering it, and on that threshold, no one agrees: neither on how many cross it, nor on whether it should be counted. It is precisely here that the count gets stuck.